Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the potential impact of falling pupil rolls on school budgets.

The majority of school funding is driven by pupil numbers. As such, the department understands that falling rolls can have a significant impact on schools’ budgets.

The lagged funding system, where schools are funded on the basis of their pupil numbers in the previous October census, helps to give schools more certainty over funding levels to aid their planning and is particularly important in giving schools that see year-on-year reductions in their pupil numbers time to reorganise their costs before seeing the funding impact.

In addition, the department allocates falling rolls funding on the basis of the reduction in pupil numbers that local authorities experience each year. Local authorities can choose to operate a falling rolls fund to support schools which see a short-term fall in the number of pupils on roll.

The department will continue to keep the national funding formula under review, including the impact it has on schools with falling rolls.