Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of funding allocated to sixth form students.

The government is investing an additional £291 million in 16 to 19 education in 2021 to 2022. This is in addition to the £400 million awarded in the 2019 Spending Review, which was the biggest injection of new money into 16-19 education in a single year since 2010. This has allowed us to raise the base rate of funding for all providers of 16-19 education, including school sixth forms and sixth form colleges, for the first time since the current funding system was introduced in 2013 – from £4,000 in each academic year up to 2019/20, to £4,188 this year and next year – as well as to make further funding increases targeted on high value and high cost programmes.