Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much her Department has spent on radio adverts in the last five years broken down by radio station.

The Department regularly uses local and national radio as part of the behaviour change and public information campaigns used to deliver manifesto commitments and policy objectives, with the aim of reaching a variety of target audiences across England.

Examples of this include helping the Department to recruit school and college teachers, promoting free childcare to parents and increasing the uptake of skills bootcamps to help adults to gain the skills in demand by businesses.

Radio is a powerful channel to reach a variety of audiences including young people, pupils, parents and businesses. However, the Department’s financial records do not record the breakdown of campaign spend between radio, television, digital or other media channels and so records of spend on individual radio stations are not held.

As set out in previous written parliamentary question responses and freedom of information (FOI) requests, over the previous five years, the Department has spent the following, in total, on campaigns including different types of marketing activity, some of which was radio advertising:

• 2018/19 - £27.2 million*
• 2019/20 - £33.3 million*
• 2020/21 - £20.5 million*
• 2021/22 - £25.7 million*
• 2022/23 - £39.5 million

To note: * denotes that this information has already been released in a written parliamentary question response or FOI response.