Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans her Department has to ensure that new and existing school building stock can adapt to rising pupil numbers.

Supporting local authorities to create sufficient school places is one of the Government’s top priorities. We have committed to invest £7 billion to create new school places between 2015 and 2021, which, along with our investment in 500 new free schools, we expect to provide 600,000 new places. £4.8 billion of this is already allocated for 2015 to 2019.

Local authorities are under a statutory duty to ensure that there is a school place available for every child in their area. We allocate funding to councils based on their own estimates of the places they will need so there is no shortfall between the number of places we are funding and those that councils indicate they need to create. We expect local authorities to plan effectively and make good investment decisions, which is why we announce basic need funding allocations three and a half years in advance.

The establishment of free schools are helping to ensure there are enough school places for every child. The programme is responsive to the need for pupil places and 76% of mainstream free schools opened up to September 2016 have been opened in areas where there was a need for additional school places. This programme augments money given to local authorities for new school places, providing even more new places through this central programme.