Cxc I am now going to waste my time pissing in the wind again, which is what I have learnt you are doing when you try quoting a bit of reality to a leave poster on here. Not very far back trying challenged remain posters to come up with what those who voted remain would make our priorities now and how we would go about it. So several of us did in some detail. Not a word. Indeed in several months of posting I have yet to see a leave voter go down the funnel of detailed argument to defend their point of view but I am nothing if not glass half full and the school place issue is one I know a lot about because I have spent years campaigning, and been involved in the birth of a parent led free school on these pages
You think there would not be a shortage of school places if it were not for immigrants. I know there would be a school place shortage irrespective of immigration.
Back in 2010 in my borough we knew that the next five years would see a 17% increase in the number of Year 6 children, nothing to do with immigration, it was based on the birth rate from 2000 on (remember the millennium baby boom) . This is a wealthy middle class suburb with low immigration, and those that are here pay taxes just like the rest of us so you would think we could all reasonably expect sufficient school places. Our LEA knew it and Gove knew it too, it was mentioned in his speeches. This was on top of the fact that already there were only enough places in state secondaries to educate half the children in the borough. Parents knew that if they lived in certain roads they would not have the offer of a place in a good school and would have to move, home school or go private. This was handy for the LEA because it meant they filled every last school place and that was good for the budget if not parents (they have the same strategy at primary level too) The safety valve that protected the LEA from prosecution was that a couple of local schools had been made academies and handed to a sponsor who was experimenting with a weird model of computer based learning, those schools were judged OFSTED inadequate and for five years the LEA told us they were improving, they have finally conceded that was crap and pressured out the weird sponsor, in the meantime the schools were a good deterrent that kept parents conveniently removing themselves from the waiting lists.
So there you have it, as of 2010 we already had an LEA that was failing in its duty to provide sufficient school places.
On top of that we had a government trying to take the provision of new school places out of the hands of LEAs which would be fine for our borough, because they were crap, except that any new school had to be a free school and it had to have a sponsor, and a site, in our crowded urban area. Our LEA decided in the face of the looming shortage of places to give pretty much the only available site away for an exclusive faith school even though there is an overprovision of faith places, and when it came to it, Gove backed them up, but hey ho, if you are a parent faced with the current school place situation in our borough sitting in a pew is a small price to pay compared with moving or going private. Hence in the end desperate parents had to start a school of their own, it still does not have a site.
So tell me trying and Cxc how in this steaming pile of LEA incompetence and central government Gove sponsored dogma can you possibly locate immigration as the issue? I would love to know, because I have spent a fair amount of the last five years trying to hold those responsible to account .