Free Schools: Finance

(asked on 11th March 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has allocated any funding for free schools to other policy areas in the past 12 months.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 19th March 2019

Published budgets represent our best estimate of how money will be spent this year. In-year changes to the delivery of construction programmes, including the free schools programme, do not impact on the overall budget for those programmes. Any change to those estimates is managed within the Department’s overall capital budget.

The Department is investing £23 billion in the school estate in the current Spending Review period (2016-17 to 2020-21), including the free schools programme. There are 443 free schools open across the country. The Department is working with proposers to establish up to a further 263 free schools, and in the 2017 Budget, announced funding towards the cost of approving an additional 110 new schools.

Details on 2018-19 capital budgets can be found in the Department’s ‘Supplementary Estimate’, available at: https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/Education/Estimates-Memoranda/doe-Supplementary-Estimate-17-19.pdf.

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