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

Talkinpeace, seems to be Hillingdon Council. Spending 149 million on the school extensions.

bryte suspect I live in the same large town in East Anglia as you...

My daughter attends a small CofE school which had nearly 4x the number of applications for the usual 30 place intake this year. It has been told it must take another reception class (in a portacabin), and has now proposed to double the school size by expanding to a 2 class 60 place intake every year. The school is in the centre of town, has a tiny playground, virtually no facilities and nowhere to expand into. The plans for the expansion are ludicrous, and the consultation the council set up was laughable. The architect even admitted trying to fit double the number of puipls into an already tiny space was 'not ideal'.

The school is amazing, and it has a great reputation for a reason. But the surge in birth rate did not happen overnight, and I struggle to understand why the local council are so short-sighted that they could not see the expansion in the birth rate and large increase in economic migrants (with big families).

It's a really depressing situation...and absolutely agree about the lack of foresight in looking at secondary places. And we wonder why we're so far behind in the world education stakes.

MothershipG
Sadly because I live in a town that sold its secondary school years ago I've had to read up on such things.
Trust me, Gove and his acolytes seem to think that Free schools and Sponsored academies will pop up where there is need rather than where there is potential profit.
They are deluded, and the UK's children will suffer for his arrogance.

I find it shocking that the most populated areas and areas with jobs are the ones where schools are oversubscribed. Surely easy enough to anticipate??!

I'm in Oxford. Oversubscribed. Didn't get my DD1 into school and had to go private. Never wanted that but wasn't much alternative.

Sorry Talkin I have neither the time or the patience to wade through that excessively tedious looking 6 pages so if you have I am happy to concede that you know more than me and I bow to your greater wisdom.

Fortunately for my DC 1 has moved onto Secondary and the other is in Y6, the 3 form intake got to Y3 this year I think, I really feel for the kids coming up behind them when the school reaches capacity!

MothershipG
www.education.gov.uk/schools/leadership/schoolorganisation/f00209212/establishing-new-school
Despite the academy/Free School presumption, in certain exceptional circumstances it is still possible to publish proposals for a new maintained school outside of a competition, under sections 10 or 11 of the EIA 2006.

Speak to the head of Education at what is left of EAling LEA and ask if they have permission to build a school to meet the need.

Southwark does not have one single LEA controlled community secondary.

Well our Local gov did a very convincing impression of being caught on the hop when then presented an extra form as a choice but then bullied the school into it when they dissented!

They were desperately trying to justify themselves but at no point suggested it was because they hadn't been permitted to build new schools. And frankly I don't believe our local councillors wouldn't have lept at the chance to blame some one else!

MothershipG
It is NOT a surprise to LEAs and local government.
But Whitehall - Gove in particular - has barred them from building new schools.

This is old news for Ealing they've been struggling to find enough places for every child in the borough for several years.

The primary my DC go to has been 'over-subscribed within catchment' for donkey's years because it's popular and has a stupid shaped catchment (based on old parish boundaries I think.) As a 2 form entry school on a very small site, not a blade of grass and we celebrated our centenary a few years back, it felt crowded but the LEA bullied the school into going to 3 forms of entry. Had to build up and rejig playground so now kids have less space per head than battery hens.

What amazes me is how this increase in numbers seems to have come as such a surprise to local gov/strategy planners and no one from the council could give me an answer why this was.

Our primary had a drop in intake this year. There are usually two reception classes but they didn't have the numbers so only have one class this year. I was wondering if the low birth rate for 2008 was local or national - I guess this thread has answered the question that it's local!!

I'm very grateful our local CofE school is only moderately religious and not over-subscribed. The frequent despairing threads on MN where people can't get their children into a local school and have to travel for miles are awful. It absolutely shouldn't be the case that children can't go to their own local school.

I'm refusing to even think about secondary schools at this point

Surrey village.moved dd in to local school when we moved last year as a place was available and thank God we did as local rumour says out of thirty places 24 likely to go to siblings (which will now include ds). if the rumors are true the school is going to be very very oversubscribed this year.thing is all the surrounding town schools are overflowing.

It's not just mainstream schools. Special schools are having huge pressure put on places - more children are being born with disabilities due to surviving earlier and earlier births, infrastructure is old and outdated.

DD1's school has already increased capacity as far as is able and even at this point in the year, the number of children 'needing' a place at her school far outstrips the number of places available.

In our local mainstream area we are quite lucky. Our nearest (within 5 miles) 6 schools are rated Oustanding (5) and Good (1) so there is, in theory, no such thing as a 'bad' school here. Last year, none of the schools were oversubscribed.

Iggity
Is Hillingdon LEA opening them, or are they free schools / academies?

SE here - DD1 & 2's primary was built as a middle school with a 1 class intake originally (so approx 150 children), it's now been a 3 class intake for the last 2 years so has roughly 480 children (Yr & Y1 3 classes and Y2-6 2 classes). Luckily it was built on a very large site so has room to expand.

The next closest school had when DD1 started YR split intake classes (YR & Y1 were one class) and was close to shutting, now it's heaving due to the baby boom.

I'm not sure that large intake schools are a modern issue, I'm in my 30's & my junior school had a 6 class intake but the 6 classes were amalgamated into 5 classes in the 2nd year & had 35+ children in each class (only 1 teacher & no TA per class of course!)

Hillingdon is opening two new schools and several other schools are building extensions.

Our first choice school is a 30 class entry Catholic school which we are in catchment for but no idea what our chances are. 2nd school is also Catholic which takes 90 but we are not in catchment. Both are rated outstanding. Our other 4 choices are state schools but would really not be happy sending DS to any of them despite them being rated good or outstanding.

We are lucky that we generally have good/outstanding schools in our area (Ruislip). I'm pretty certain we will get a place somewhere close to us as we are wedged in between one good school and another outstanding one but neither are the actual two that we want.

We did look into private but the only one that was semi convenient was going to charge us a term's fees if we accepted and then turned down the place. Fair enough but we aren't millionaires and given the calibre of the state/faith schools, not too disappointed.

Praying hard!

There are loads of spaces in schools round here. I think only two get filled to max.

Loads of space up here in the Highlands of Scotland! Tiny classes and schools, cheap property, better weather than you would think. All very, very welcome!

our local primary (and I believe most others around here) had originally taken on what was initially described as a 'bulge' year for year 1. This has now become a permanent intake (from 3 to 4 form intake now) which makes an already big school, massive.
What I find concerning is where do all these pupils go in 3,4 -5 years time? The secondary schools are already over subscribed and will have to take this massive increase. It is as though that impact hasn't even been considered yet!

MAKE THE GOVERNMENT LET LOCAL AUTHORITIES OPEN SCHOOLS WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED.

Gove has a political antipathy to LEAs - hence half of Secondary schools are now outside LEA control
but it means that the "Council" is not allowed to open new schools - it can expand existing ones - so long as they are not Academies
but it cannot open a new one

even in a town like Southampton that has no Secondary school at all in the City Centre - because the plot was sold for housing in the early 1990's

Stiffybyng I think the ability to re-negotiate old S106 agreements will sadly focus more on developers trying to reduce their % of affordable homes, developers trying to limit how much of the building waste is recycled.
The amounts that authorities get from residential developments is quite small and typically limited to grass verges/lampposts etc.

I'm in suburban North London and a teacher. As well as rising birth rates, my borough has high levels of new immigrants and inward migration from pricier parts of London, which has increased dramatically since the housing benefit cap came in. Most schools are either expanding permanently or have at least one bulge class. The few that are refusing to expand for safety/space reasons (including one I used to work in) are having their funding reduced by the council.

There are an increasing number of 'super-schools' in the local area - one primary near me is in the process of expanding to take 840 children, and it's far from being the exception. The school has no field and the new development will reduce the already tiny playground. At other schools I know of, children are being taught in corridors, or doing subjects that need more space/resources (music, ICT, PE) on a rota basis. Since school halls are usually used for lunches as well as lessons, there's often reduced teaching time for e.g. PE/drama, as tables have to be set up for lunch and then packed away afterwards. Lunch rotas with three or four sittings mean that many children are only given ten minutes to eat their lunch before the next lot come in - hardly conducive to developing a healthy relationship with food! Catchments for the most popular schools are now down to the nearest one or two roads. Last year across the borough 99 children had no school place at all, and 162 more weren't offered places at any of their six primary choices.

So many councils seem to be panicking now, when they should have picked up on the increasing birth rates years ago and realised that more school places (and more schools) would be needed. Instead we now have this mad rush to cram more children into existing schools and build on any spare piece of green space. So far there seems to be no action at all on secondary places - perhaps the councils are just hoping these extra children will disappear?

It's madness, and unless drastic action is taken soon, it's only going to get worse. The quality of education will inevitably suffer in such overcrowded conditions (and I say that as someone who has to teach in them!)

We live in Surrey commuter-belt. Local school is outstanding. We moved here for the school, plus commuter links. Luckily we were early to move here after the Ofsted report, because in the past couple of years there has been a HUGE influx of families for that reason. DC1 got in, which should mean DC2 dos too.

Haven't RTFT, but I imagine someone had already mentioned the impact of the economy? We definitely fall into the bracket of higher-earners who in times-gone-by would have been able to afford private education, but with uncertainty over DH's sector and reduced bonuses, etc, we just can't risk over-extending ourselves and decided to take the hit on the mortgage/house instead, to move to an area where the schools were good.

I do think the Ofsted ratings have created the problem in part. There are other perfectly decent schools in nearby towns but no one wants their children to go there, everyone competes for the "outstanding" ones.