Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of section 68 of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 on the funding routes available for new secondary school provision required to serve strategic housing development sites.

These sections of the Act allow, alongside proposals for new academies, for local authorities to invite proposals for other types of school and to put forward their own proposals. Allowing additional routes to delivery helps to ensure that good schools are opened when they are needed, particularly where the right high-quality academy trust is not immediately available. As such, these changes support local authorities in fulfilling their place planning function.

We provide local authorities with capital funding through the Basic Need capital grant to support them to provide school places, based on their own pupil forecasts.

Developer contributions are also an important way of helping to meet demand for new school places when housing developments are driving pupil numbers. While Basic Need allocations can be used for new school places that are required due to housing development, we would expect the amount used to meet this demand to be the minimum necessary to maintain development viability.