Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support her Department is providing to local education authorities with place planning following recent trends in birth rates.

Local authorities have a statutory responsibility to ensure there are enough school places available in their area for every child of compulsory school age. We expect local authorities, academy trusts and local partners to engage collaboratively and constructively with to balance the supply and demand of school places, in line with changing demographics locally.

We recognise that demographic change requires local areas to adapt to changing demand for school places. As announced in our Education Estates Strategy, we are supporting local areas to plan strategically by developing a local decision-making framework for the use of school space through demographic change, with publication expected in Autumn 2026. This will aim to increase transparency over decision making and supporting early strategic conversations with local partners and the department, to provide support to schools and communities as early as possible.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act has introduced new measures that enable greater local collaboration on pupil admissions between local authorities and schools.

This includes a measure to enable the Schools Adjudicator, in cases where they uphold an objection to a school’s published admission number (PAN), to specify what it should be. School quality and parental preference will be key considerations in any decision on PAN.

We have also introduced new duties for mainstream state schools and local authorities to co-operate regarding their respective school admissions functions, and for mainstream, special and alternative provision state schools to co-operate with local authorities regarding their place planning functions.

These new legislative measures strengthen the vital aspects of managing school capacity and mitigating the impacts associated with falling pupil numbers locally.

Schools are funded based on pupil numbers in the previous October census. This gives schools with falling rolls some time to re-organise staffing before their funding is affected. Falling rolls funding is also provided to local authorities for schools seeing a short-term decrease in pupil numbers. We have also broadened the scope of growth and falling rolls funding to allow local authorities to use growth funding to meet the revenue costs of removing surplus places.

Despite challenging choices over public spending, the core school budget is increasing by £1.7 billion in 2026-27. This includes funding to deliver SEND reform, which will total £4 billion over three years, to embed inclusive practice in mainstream schools.

We are also backing local areas to respond with new capital investment to repurpose surplus school space - including £400 million to create or expand thousands of additional school-based nurseries across England and £3.7 billion over five years to create tens of thousands of new places, including in mainstream schools, for children and young people with SEND.