Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of including information about school libraries in the school census return.

The department has no current plans to collect any specific data about school libraries in the school census.

The school census is the department’s primary source of administrative data about pupils attending schools in England. We keep the content of all our data collections, including the school census, under review to ensure that the data we collect is necessary, feasible and minimises the data collection burden placed on the sector.