Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate she has made of the number of (a) primary and (b) secondary schools in debt in (i) England and (ii) Essex.

The department trusts schools to manage their own budgets, and the vast majority are operating with a cumulative surplus, with only a small percentage having a deficit.

The latest published figures for academies show that at a national level, 98% of academy trusts are in cumulative surplus or breaking even nationally. These figures for academy trusts relate to 31 August 2023.

For maintained schools, at national level, 14.7% of maintained primary schools and 13% of maintained secondary schools were in deficit. In the Essex local authority 6.9% of maintained primary schools and no secondary schools were in deficit in the same period. The figures for maintained schools relate to 31 March 2024.

The department does not hold local authority level figures for academies, since their funding is managed at Trust level, and many Trusts operate across local authorities’ boundaries. The financial benchmarking and insights tool on GOV.UK provides resources to review the finances of individual academies. This tool is available at: https://financial-benchmarking-and-insights-tool.education.gov.uk/data-sources.