Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many schools closed in rural areas in England in (a) 2018, (b) 2019, (c) 2020 and (d) 2021.

This data has been taken from Get Information About Schools, the department’s register of schools[1]. The data includes all types of mainstream local authority maintained schools, academies, and free schools. Schools are identified as rural via the Office of National Statistics Rural Urban Classification. The data excludes closures of schools where they become an academy as a result of intervention following an Inadequate Ofsted judgement or acquire a new Unique Reference Number on transfer between trusts.

The presumption against the closure of rural primary schools means that when considering proposals to close a rural local authority maintained primary school, decision makers must refer to the list of rural designated schools. For a rural academy, both the department and the local authority need to agree to the closure.

The national funding formula (NFF) recognises the essential role that small, rural schools play in their communities through additional support provided through the sparsity factor. As a result of the changes to the design sparsity factor for the 2022/23 financial year, the total number of schools eligible for sparsity funding through the NFF has increased from over 1,200 to over 2,500, and the total allocation to small, remote schools through the sparsity factor has more than doubled, from £42 million in the 2021/22 financial year to £95 million in the 2022/23 financial year.

[1] Responsibility for updating Get Information about Schools is shared between the department, schools, and local authorities and therefore we cannot guarantee the accuracy of this data.