Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much funding his Department has allocated to schools in (a) Coventry North East constituency and (b) Coventry for building improvement programmes in each of the last five years.
The department allocates condition funding each year to those responsible for school buildings to improve and maintain the condition of the school estate. Most condition funding allocations are calculated at a responsible body level and cannot be broken down to constituency level, as decisions on investment are often taken at a local level.
Schools and those responsible for school buildings receive condition funding through different routes depending on their size and type. The majority of condition funding is paid to responsible bodies through annual School Condition Allocations (SCA). Devolved Formula Capital (DFC) is also allocated for schools to spend on their own capital priorities.
The department has allocated over £20 million in condition funding to Coventry local authority since 2017 for maintained schools (see attached table). This includes SCA (and up to the 2019-20 financial year, funding paid via the local authority Voluntary Aided Programme for voluntary aided schools), and DFC. As part of this, in the 2018-19 financial year, additional funding was made available through the Healthy Pupils Capital Fund, as well as £400 million additional DFC. In the 2020-21 financial year, the government made an additional £560 million available for essential maintenance and upgrade projects. Coventry local authority’s share of additional funding has been included in figures in the table.
Large multi-academy trusts and large voluntary aided school bodies, also receive SCA funding to invest in schools for which they are responsible. These are not included in the figures as large academy trusts and voluntary aided school bodies will typically span local authority boundaries. A full breakdown of allocations can be found on GOV.UK.
Smaller trusts, voluntary aided schools and sixth form colleges that are not eligible for SCA can bid into the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) each year. Over the last 5 years, there have been 3 successful CIF applications for eligible schools in the Coventry North East Constituency with a total funding award of £1.2 million. Over the same period, for Coventry overall there have been 38 successful CIF applications with a total funding award of £12.4 million.
For the Priority School Building Programme there have been two schools in the Coventry North-East constituency, and six schools in the Coventry Local Authority over the last five years. So far, there have not been any schools from the Coventry North East constituency within the new School Rebuilding Programme. However, four schools in the Coventry local authority area are included in the first 100 projects of the programme that have been announced to date.