Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to his Written Statement of 24 July on Teachers Update, WS912, how will the savings from his Department’s budget to fund the teachers pay grant be made.

We are fully funding the teachers’ pay award, by providing a Teachers’ Pay Grant worth £187 million in 2018-19 and £321 million in 2019-20. This grant will be additional and separate to the funding schools receive through the national funding formula. It funds the difference between the 1% award schools would have been anticipating, under the previous public sector pay cap, and the proposed award for next year.

There will be no cuts to existing programmes to fund this grant. In setting the core schools budget, worth £42.4 billion this year and £43.5 billion next year, the Department has to make estimates around a range of factors, such as pupil numbers. The Department has now worked hard to scrutinise these forecasts and assumptions in-year, and that has allowed it to free up the funding required for the pay grant – less than 0.6% of the overall budget, over two years.