Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much and what proportion of (a) primary and (b) secondary schools' expenditure was on staff in each of the last three years.

Overall core revenue funding for schools totals almost £61.6 billion for the 2024/25 financial year. At the Autumn Budget 2024, the government announced an additional £2.3 billion for mainstream schools and young people with high needs for the 2025/26 financial year, compared to 2024/25. This means that overall core school funding will total almost £63.9 billion in 2025/26. Each school has autonomy to allocate their budgets, including for their staff, to best meet the needs of their pupils to ensure they have the best opportunities in life.

The latest three years of published data for schools’ spending relates to the 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23 financial years. Our estimates in the table below for the proportions of expenditure for teachers and support staff have been compiled by combining published expenditure data sets from academies, which budget by academic year, and local authority maintained schools, which budget by financial year. We have not included cash expenditure data as combining financial and academic year data on school expenditure for different types of schools is less robust for estimating expenditure amounts than it is for estimating proportions. The pattern of expenditure in both 2020/21 and 2021/22 was affected by COVID-19.

Further data on schools’ expenditure in the years following the 2022/23 financial year will be published in due course.