Data showing the condition of school buildings will be published before the end of the summer recess, the Department for Education (DfE) has pledged.
Government ministers defeated an Opposition Day Debate in Parliament on Tuesday evening (May 23). A Labour-led motion forcing the DfE to publish data from school building surveys carried out between 2017 and 2019 was defeated by 296 to 171. But during the debate schools minister Nick Gibb did promise Parliament that the data would be published by the end of the summer.
The problem of crumbling school buildings is not going away for ministers, with opposition politicians and education trade unions piling on the pressure, particularly over real-terms cuts to capital funding.
Research by the House of Commons Library revealed that overall DfE capital spending has declined by around 37% in cash terms and 50% in real terms between 2009/10 and 2021/22 (Danechi & Long, 2023).
