Primary-school places shortfall: what's happening where you live?

I am not sure is it not a case that simply most parents are trying to get there children into the same outstanding schools

We have schools in. Our area people have to be dragged kicking and screaming to that have plenty of roo, but no oe wants them

Wait everyone it's ok! Gorgeous George is about to give those of us who don't receive tax credits a £1k tax break on childcare, oh no wait IDS, that charming champion of the parent, has decided to scrap it.

I truly don't have the words at times!

On a related note, sorry for the hijack, but could any of you out on the Wirral please pm me with details of the school situation there please. Dh is working out there and we are debating our options.

IN SW London where I live DS2 didn't get a primary place we went private suddenly everyone has found god..............

It may predate Gove but he is at this precise moment in time ultimately responsible for ensuring every child who needs one has a school place he or she can realistically access.

A class action of angry parents would be interesting! Or more realistically a judicial review of his £1 billion spend on academies over 2 years instead of generating new places where they are required (and I have not even costed up free schools in that equation).

Perhaps we need a toddler/small child protest? Buggy March on Westminster? Time running out of snacks as we get close?!

Or, in an era of increasing privatisation launch a reclaim private fees/full time childcare fees campaign for anyone who's had to use those routes because they didn't have a place?

We live in Bournemouth where there is a huge shortage of primary school places. I think DS is in the last year group (currently in Y4) where there are just about enough places in the borough for each child to have a school place - albeit not necessarily in their catchment school.

DD, now in Y1, is in a year group where there was a shortfall of 300-400 Year R places; this was situation was predicted in the newspapers at least 2 years before we had to apply for her school place, and the LEA acknowledges that it is drastically short of school places, which of course will only get worse as they approach secondary school. It is a terrible situation to be in.

Given that we live in a town where there is a lot of immigration, both from elsewhere in the UK (articularly from London) and from abroad, the waiting lists for primary schools are getting longer and longer during each academic year. Many schools had to put on a bulge class last year, or are doing so this coming year, and there is talk of this becoming permanent and/or new primary schools being built; no idea when or where. This is all straight from the horse's mouth (i.e. the Head of Admissions at Bmouth Council). Anybody moving into the area with a child who needs an in-year transfer to a primary school in YR, Y1 or Y2 will not have a chance of getting allocated a school that scores higher than level 3 on Ofsted (I know that not everyone sets great store by Ofsted reports, but many do) and they are highly unlikely to be offered a school place close to their home. Like someone upthread, our DD is currently sitting on the waiting lists for a state school place whilst being educated at a private school; this is not a situation that is sustainable for us in the long-term and in fact we may well have to give notice next term, in the hope that a place comes up for her before September (shes no.2 on the waiting list for our catchment school, and no.14 (!) on the waiting list at DS' school as, although she has a sibling there, we are out of catchment although only 0.8 miles away from the school). May have to home-school her for a term or two until a place becomes available as we have pretty much run out of money.

DS' junior school, by the way, has 4-form entry as standard, and currently has a fifth Y3 bulge class and the linked infant school will have a fifth YR bulge class in September. The infrastructure simply cannot cope with this; there is nowhere to hold whole-school assemblies, computers are now on trollies rather than being stationed permanently in classrooms, the kids eat packed lunches in their classrooms, the surrounding streets are bloody lethal at school-run time, the gates are jammed with kids and parents, the infant school's outside space is tiny ..... and there are now additional numbers of children who need SEN support etc (including my DS!) so resources are really, really stretched.

As others have said - these problems have been building for years and years. It's wicked that nothing has been done about it before now.

I will happily sign any petition etc going that might get the powers-that-be to sit up and take notice ...

We've just moved from Lambeth to Lewisham. Our old flat was in a similar area to some of the Lambeth dwellers on the thread. The closest community school to our old flat has pretty much been turned into a three form entry which seemed too big. I grew up overseas and always went to really small schools. There were a couple of small CoE schools nearby but we aren't believers and stood little chance of getting in.

Where we live now we should get our DD into our first choice school, based on distance, especially as it is doing a bulge year in September. If we don't we're screwed, as the next three nearest schools are all outstanding and totally and utterly over-subscribed. We're way out of all of their current catchment boundaries which are all between 300-400 metres.

I can't even think about what it will be like with secondary school places.

merry I hope at least a decent proportion of those are HE but I suspect most are those who haven't/can't navigate the system. A friends cleaner was in bits about a lack of reception place, English isn't her first language and she was baffled. A few middle class phone calls and a place was found at her 2nd choice school. The list that the borough held wasn't up to date/accurate.

The comment about flats was also interesting earlier, our bit of Lambeth is changing fast and from the GP practices onwards there's concern about the pressures they'll face & the cuts in funding. I'm scared about a lack of Sept 2014 place but know we'll sort it somehow. I fear for the children for whom sorting it isn't an option.

As for pre school places, that's just a bloody joke.

Sometimes I wish we could move to an underpopulated area. But DH in particular has a London based career. And I can't see that a move to commuter belt will help us. I keep thinking I should find out about HE now, 'just in case'.

Sigh. But Cameron et al are too busy playing party politics to do anything meaningful. By which I mean, as someone said, feeling that your child can happily go to your nearest school

Many Councils are struggling as they are under immense pressure to allow new housing to be built but at the same time the government is weakening their powers to secure new infrastructure such as schools. There are several new housing developments in this area (rural midlands) with new primary schools proposed but whether these will really be delivered remains to be seen.

Victoria Derbyshire says primary schools are not over crowded in South Wesat London

Mr Gove does not even look up to the job he has been given. No sign of intellect

I've just a had a nose in the planning system, for other reasons, and discovered that there is a planning application in for an extension to an existing classroom at ds1's school. Which as I can't access the planning docs, and neither are they at school (I was unaware if any planning permission being applied for), I have to assume means that somewhere along the line more playground space will be lost.

The annoying thing is that ds1's school just finished a huge amont of building work and they're intending to start again! Our council are utterly, utterly incompetent! Furthermore, I'm in a rant here, as I mentioned upthread, the preschool has unprecedented demand for September, but the same council has out the building they use under threat of closure to save money! There is no nursery provision in the village other than preschool.

Tiggy, I've heard of that before - kids who don't have any place not being bumped up the queue - and it's shit. Councillors really should be changing the policy to make sure children without a place are top of the list. Glad your dd or ds has finally got somewhere, but what a ridiculous amount of stress to put you through.

What happens if the child is not offered any place as described above?

Does your child simply not go to school until a place comes available?

I should have added that DS is classed as an out of area sibling so is bumped further down the list for place allocation.

They're doing forest school instead of PE for one lesson a week now to make use of the local Country Park, as the field & hall aren't big enough.

Good idea, but it's been done BECAUSE they haven't the facilities for their current pupils!

My DS's Primary is so overstretched that almost all classes have between 31-35 DC's in (the older they get, the larger the classes get).

The only TA's that can fit in the classroom are the 1-2-1's that are attached to DC's with statements. Which has led to the school illegally taking DC's OFF SA+ that should still be there due to outside involvement from medical professionals. This means that any DC with SN's that should be getting TA time through an IEP now isn't.

It's not the school's fault, but it means that for those DC's with SN's that require 15 hrs a week help or less that should be on SA /SA+ are being left unable to access education effectively because of space constrictions.

Something NEEDS to be done. But no government is willing to tackle the system effectively. It needs MASSIVE investment to bring the school places to where the DC are, rather than taking the DC's to where the school places are...

And if all schools were expected to be equal, and MADE to be equal, all providing an Oustanding education, all helping DC's with SN's to the same extent, all having the same ways of dealing with bullying, then maybe it would solve the problem.

Because then EVERYONE might be happy to send their DC's to their local school, knowing that their DC would get the same quality of education whether the school was in the middle of a council estate that measures highly on the deprivation index, or if the school was on a leafy suburb.

Why WOULD people accept a substandard education for their DC's and not do everything they can to get their DC's into a better school if the schools aren't equal?

I personally would rather HE than send my DC's to a 4/5/6+ FE primary school. Their SN's would make that far too overwhelming. Ditto a 4-18 school as is being proposed as the school that should become my catchment school.

Each to their own. My DS2 will start to struggle even more next year when their tiny school has to cope with 15 classes when the school was built to hold 3.5 classes originally, and at its maximum expansion, the facilities (not classrooms but halls etc, lunch areas etc, were expanded to hold just 7 classes.

My DS's get just 10 mins for lunch now. And there is talk next year of that dropping even further because a very high percentage of parents pay for hot meals - there is an 85% uptake on hot meals here, in a school that currently has 420 pupils eating in a hall that can't hold more than 90 pupils at a time.

And there will be an EXTRA 30+ next year...

We live in a smallish town in the SW. There are four primary schools in our town, and I've heard that they are all due to be full this September, and possibly oversubscribed.

The school (state primary a couple of miles away) DD goes to was full last year, because there was a large take up of sibling places, but this year there will be some places available. DS should be able to get in. If he doesn't, we'll be struggling to find somewhere for him to go too.

Thanks guys. I didn't know that (one of the primaries could have told me!). Will try that route. Will also ask about secondary as the only response I have had is that if we are in catchment and our children are at a catchment school they will get a place. Which seemed a bit strange to me.

I guess we will sion be joining the struggle to get children a place at school when older than reception. Joy.

MsPickle - Surely some of that 500 that didn't submit applications would have been DC's that are going to be HE? If not, why on earth weren't they chased up like they are in my LA?

Someone made a point earlier (sorry,on phone so finding it not easy!) that the Ofsted rankings are possibly also partly to blame. That's been running around my head as I suspect there's something in that, not least in the way it's made it 'easier' to move into a catchment for 'your sort of school' if you've the money to do so. Pre publication of those results you had to know an area to know that sort of detail, now a quick google/estate agent link will tell you what you want to know. But as this thread shows schools can change character so fast/economic reasons shift the private/state balance, part of me thinks is it any wonder that LEAs, never known for the speed of response, are struggling to keep up and then add in the local and national politics-how do we fix it? And I mean that as a genuine question; how do we create a system where children can know which school they are going to in reasonable time and have access to decent education?

Live in SE Essex. One local council us expanding existing schools, including additional campuses because they don't want to build brand new school. I understand that current government policy means only new schools allowed are academies and free schools. This means the council would bear the cost of building the school then be forced to hand over all control of it.