Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate she has made of the number of secondary schools in debt.

83 local authority maintained secondary schools were operating a deficit at the end of the 2023/24 financial year, according to their financial reporting returns.

Academy trusts are responsible for the combined accounts of all the academies within their trusts, and so it is not possible to accurately identify the number of individual secondary academies in deficit. At the end of the 2022/23 academic year, around 98% of academy trusts were in cumulative surplus or breaking even, while 55 academy trusts had a deficit.