Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an estimate of the proportion of schools able to fully cover the incremental costs of the recommended pay increase using the funding announced.

The department is providing schools with almost £1.1 billion in 2024/25 through the Core Schools Budget Grant (CSBG) to support them with overall costs. This funding matches what the department has calculated is needed to fully fund, at a national level, the 5.5% teacher pay award and the support staff pay offer in the 2024/25 financial year, after accounting for the overall available headroom in schools’ existing budgets.

The department’s judgement of affordability is based on national figures, which equates to the position of an “average” school. The funding system is not designed so that every school gets the same funding increase every year: it is designed so that schools seeing the largest pressures typically attract the largest funding increases. It does not match each individual school’s precise costs, as schools have autonomy over their own spending.