Jess Phillips – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jess Phillips on 2016-01-28.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the relevant per pupil outturn expenditure on Education Services Grant-supported activities for the highest, median and lowest spending local authorities was for the 2014-15 financial year; and if she will publish the same statistics for planned expenditure for the 2015-16 financial year.

Mr Sam Gyimah

The Education Services Grant (ESG) is unringfenced and local authorities therefore have complete discretion on how to spend this funding. The Department for Education has previously set out a list of activities that the grant is intended to fund, which can be found online here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335723/ESG_AnnexA_reformatted.pdf

Local authorities report their planned expenditure on the related budget lines through their section 251 returns and the data from these returns are published online. The data for 2014-15 can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-benchmarking-tables-2014-to-2015 and the data for 2015-16 can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/section-251-2015-to-2016

“