Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what her Department's estimate is of the potential number of pupils in the 2017 secondary intake; and what projections they have made for future intakes in each of the next five years.

The Department produces annual pupil projections for each year by age rather than by school national curriculum year. Information about the projected number of pupils by age in secondary schools is in the underlying data of the national pupil projections statistics[1].

From the most recent projections, figures for the estimated future number of pupils in secondary schools, in January of each year, who were age 11 at the start of the academic year (that is the age at which the vast majority of pupils are in year 7) are given below.

[1] Data from the 2016 national pupil projections is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-pupil-projections-july-2016 in the document called ‘Underlying data: SFR25/2016’.