What education costs
Education chapter 2. Cash spending, what the figure does and does not include, and the number published alongside it that moves the other way.
Local authority education spending was £79.4bn in 2024-25, against £62.8bn in 2015-16 — a cash increase of 26%, before any adjustment for inflation.
The totals
These are net figures — gross expenditure minus income. Gross totals are larger and double-count money that arrives as income and goes straight back out, which is why they are not used here.
Source: DfE, LA and school expenditure. Net of income, cash terms.
View as table
| Period | Local authority education expenditure, net |
|---|---|
| 2015-16 | £63bn |
| 2016-17 | £62bn |
| 2017-18 | £60bn |
| 2018-19 | £59bn |
| 2019-20 | £59bn |
| 2020-21 | £60bn |
| 2021-22 | £64bn |
| 2022-23 | £66bn |
| 2023-24 | £70bn |
| 2024-25 | £79bn |
This is the local authority share, not the national total
This covers local authority education expenditure. It is not the whole of what England spends on education: academies are funded directly rather than through their local authority, and higher education, student finance and much of further education sit outside this collection entirely. Read it as the local-authority share, not the national total.
By main category
View as table
| Year | Other education and community | Schools |
|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | £5.47bn | £57.35bn |
| 2016-17 | £5.86bn | £55.64bn |
| 2017-18 | £5.37bn | £54.43bn |
| 2018-19 | £5.22bn | £53.68bn |
| 2019-20 | £5.46bn | £53.14bn |
| 2020-21 | £5.57bn | £54.62bn |
| 2021-22 | £6.20bn | £57.34bn |
| 2022-23 | £6.91bn | £59.32bn |
| 2023-24 | £8.15bn | £62.08bn |
| 2024-25 | £9.16bn | £70.24bn |
Schools in deficit
17.8% of local authority maintained schools ended 2024-25 in deficit, against 6% in 2015-16 — 1,887 schools.
17.8%
Schools ending the year in deficit
2024-25
1,887
Schools, in number
Of 10,575 local authority maintained schools
6%
The same figure a decade earlier
2015-16
Local authority maintained schools only. Academies report separately and are not in this series, which matters because schools have moved out of this population throughout the period.
Source: DfE, LA and school expenditure — revenue reserves of LA maintained schools.
View as table
| Period | Share of local authority maintained schools ending the year in deficit |
|---|---|
| 2015-16 | 6% |
| 2016-17 | 9.1% |
| 2017-18 | 10.2% |
| 2018-19 | 9.9% |
| 2019-20 | 12% |
| 2020-21 | 8.4% |
| 2021-22 | 8.8% |
| 2022-23 | 13.1% |
| 2023-24 | 15.3% |
| 2024-25 | 17.8% |
Two published figures moving in opposite directions
Cash spending rose across this period and the share of schools ending the year in deficit rose alongside it. Both are published in the same release. Neither figure explains the other, and this page does not offer an explanation — rising costs, changing pupil numbers, and the shift of schools out of local authority control into academy trusts all sit behind it, and this dataset separates none of them.
The population of this series is shrinking
Schools that convert to academy status leave this collection. The set of schools being measured in the latest year is therefore not the set measured in the first, and the schools that left were not a random sample of those that stayed. That alone does not explain the change, but no reading of this series can ignore it.
What this chapter is not
A real-terms series
Deflating requires choosing an index, and the GDP deflator, CPI and schools-specific cost indices disagree about whether school spending rose or fell over the last decade. That disagreement is genuine, so this page publishes cash and points at the institutions that publish real-terms series with their deflator stated.
Total education spending in England
Academies are funded directly rather than through local authorities, and higher education, student finance and much of further education sit outside this collection. This is the local authority share.
A measure of what schools can afford
A budget balancing tells you a school did not overspend. It does not tell you what was cut to achieve that, and no national dataset records what schools stopped doing.
Two of the three expenditure files are published in cp1252 rather than UTF-8, because category labels contain en dashes. The pipeline detects encoding per file; reading them as UTF-8 fails outright.
Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: DfE, LA and school expenditure.
Related chapters
- In this sectionSpecial educational needsHigh needs funding, which rose 85% in cash over six years.
- In this sectionTeachers and the workforceStaff are the largest single item in the figures above.
- Leaves this sectionPublic financesWhere education sits in total government spending.
- Leaves this sectionWhere public money goesThe same question asked across every department.
Scope and definitions
England, not the UK
Education is devolved. Every figure on this page is England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland operate different frameworks with different legal definitions, and their figures are not directly comparable.
Population
These figures cover schools and staff in England as recorded in the annual censuses: the school census for pupils and schools, and the school workforce census for staff. They count institutions and employees, not children with any particular characteristic, and they are not the 0–25 population used in the SEND chapter.
Cash, not real terms — and this site does not deflate it
Every figure here is cash as published. It is not adjusted for inflation, and this site does not adjust it, because choosing a deflator is a judgement rather than a published fact: the GDP deflator, CPI and a schools-specific cost index give materially different answers about whether spending rose. Read these as what was spent, not as what it bought.