The Department said that it had looked carefully at the balance between funding for primary and secondary schools when it had designed the national funding formula.26 We asked whether school sixth forms were losing out in an attempt to prop up the rest of the system. The Department disagreed with this suggestion, saying that government had needed to make some hard fiscal choices, and had chosen to prioritise and protect core funding for pupils aged 5 to 16. It also emphasised that funding for 16-to-19 education was now rising—the 2019 Spending Review had provided an extra £400 million (the biggest single year increase in post-16 funding since 2010), while the 2020 Spending Review had provided an extra £291 million.27