Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 2

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

Starting a second thread as the first one is still very busy, albeit it's veered off in a few directions...

Original article

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e6465c9e-d462-48cb-a73e-74480059a1f3?shareToken=05bf599cd4a2376fe3ce83cdce607100

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14271457/map-private-schools-closing-labour-vat-raid.html

Ah, it was independentschoolmanagement.co.uk who reported in Dec that Surrey LA estimated it would need 2400 places. No idea whether that’s been the case, though.

I was hoping to find the source doc (with the 124 councils who responded listed). Will sleuth it out and see what I can find. Am just interested to see if the most effected councils (like Surrey/Hants/berks etc) were included in those stats as I’d be surprised it was higher already.

He must have known about the potential human rights challenge as it had been warned about long before the policy was implemented. I wonder if he knows there's a chance that the courts will rule that the policy does breach human rights, and that he's planning to just ignore any such ruling and plough on regardless.

Surrey certainly are 1 of the LAs saying 0 places available and anecdotally are paying for taxis until places are found, at cost to the LA.
That data only goes until Sept so I would imagine it will certainly be higher now!

Yes, was looking at an article from Oct that stated that there was a more than 8000 decrease in children starting in Y7 already at that point compared to previous years. Can’t understand why that hasn’t been highlighted more?

Will attach it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5y0w6xg43o

@CautiousLurker01 it looks like it’s from the Maily Fail:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14271457/map-private-schools-closing-labour-vat-raid.html

Plenty of other media outlets have reported on these schools closing.

Of course he knows about human rights breaches given his background. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

How it will play out?

My prediction is the the court case will detail situations where human rights are violated, but fall short of saying that the entire policy breaches human rights.

Labour will say that they'll look at it again to try to improve it - but won't do anything.

Labour will lose the next election for a variety of reasons, mainly the economy. (It obviously isn't this bill which will topple them) Not yet clear who will win.

Whoever it is, the UK will withdraw from ECHR.

That will again be for a number of reasons - but Labour bringing in a bill that breaks UK children's human rights (BP may not see them as 'our children', but they are UK children) whilst allowing criminals to stay in the UK in order not to breach their right to family life won't help.

And he will know Lord Pannick too

The online system for in year applications for my Council only has 2 options for the reason for the request.
Neither of which has any relation to a move from independent to state sector. I really don’t think this is being tracked at all. And certainly not in the way an organisation would normally measure the impact of a new policy/campaign etc.

It isn't being tracked because Labour don't want it to be tracked

Oh absolutely, I’m just not much of a fan of the Mail in general so prefer not to cite it! 🤦🏼‍♀️
But PP’s specific quote does seem to come from the Mail.

It does but the data is from FoI request. The Fail isn't always useless. At least they are reporting on it!

Agree completely, they are good on (for me) a relatively small number of issues.

Perhaps they should adopt “Not always useless” as their strapline 🤣

The trouble is that they frequently get things wrong so are not considered a credible source.

How does this data compare to periods prior to the introduction of this policy? It's pretty meaningless otherwise.

Yes - I was looking for the source of the report that stated how many/which councils has replied to the data request about how many places had been applied for, not the individual school stuff. In the mail article it references a source document but I can’t see a link to it. I’m interested to identify whether the data of the 3011 places cited includes the three LAs local to me - as I think that number is too low already if it does.

I think it must be the case that 124 separate FOIA requests have been sent to the local authorities, but it’s far from clear whether the ISC submitted these or someone else (the Mail itself?) did and the ISC spokesperson is just commenting. I had a look on the ISC website and couldn’t find any references to it.

Which 10 schools? It can't be the 10 listed in the Mail article as Alton School announced its closure last Spring.

How does that compare to any overall decline in year 7 children generally? The article doesn’t say. Current year 8/9s was the high point recently.

The decline isn't evenly spread

Am sure this has been posted before, but tha attached does suggest that the number of pupils in independent schools has been stable at least since around 2016 ish. To me, the fact that the article I posted above (also saw the stats discussed the same day in the Telegraph) shows that 9k fewer pupils started in September 2024 than in 2023 when starting figures for the preceding decade have been pretty stable is significant.

I caveat this with an acknowledgement that it was a low birth year, so you would expect fewer children to be taking up places any way. Ie 698k births in 2013, v 729k in 2012, so a 31k decrease. However, as only 93% of the population go to independent schools, statistically this only accounts for 2000 fewer 11yo children entering the private sector in that year.

https://www.civitas.org.uk/2023/02/24/private-schooling-in-britain-a-snapshot/

Just going to add, most people send multiple children, often starting at 11, so this reduced stat is likely to impact intake for 2026 and 2027 when younger siblings would also have followed. Am sure it’s the mantra at many schools that ‘give me a girl at 11 years old and her siblings are mine forever’ (mad hash of the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie quote 🤣)