Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much funding was provided to schools in (a) Wallasey, (b) Merseyside and (c) the North West from the Condition Improvement Fund in each of the last five years.

The Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) is an annual bidding round to which single and smaller academy trusts and sixth-form colleges are eligible to apply for capital funding. All other schools access capital funding through the School Condition Allocation paid to their responsible body.

In the attached table, the Department has provided a regional breakdown of CIF grant awards for the last 5 years. Accurate amounts for grants funded are not known until the work is complete, so the Department is unable to disclose the total funding amount for a CIF round until all the projects in that round are complete.

The Department intends to release individual project funding amounts for all CIF rounds once complete and, to date, we have published the funding from 2015-16. Information for CIF 2016-17 onwards does not include the funding amounts. To release the funding amounts for which applicants bid to CIF while procurement or construction works are ongoing would jeopardise the negotiating position of schools and sixth-form colleges to obtain value for money for the public purse from their contractors.