Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much his Department has spent on contracted consultants in each year since 2015.

A summary of DfE Consolidated Group consultancy expenditure for each year can be found in the relevant Annual Report and Accounts, published here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dfe-annual-reports.

Consultants are hired to work on projects in a number of specific situations:

• where the Group does not have the required skill sets
• where the requirement falls outside the core business of civil servants
• where an external, independent perspective is required

This expertise was mainly used to support change programmes across the Group and specialist research contracted out to third parties.

The expenditure for each year is as follows: