Primary schools short of 350,000 places

[mrz]

Primary schools short of 350,000 places

Problem solved. Lobby the Treasury to force Vodaphone to pay its 6bn tax avoidance.

www.private-eye.co.uk/

Actually the BSF programme was not going to be viable even if Labour had won the election. The money just wasn't there. A cynical part of me wonders if Labour knew they wouldn't win the election - having wasted so much money and put the country into huge debt- and so set these unrealistic targets just to watch the Tories take the brunt of the blame when it came to making cuts. I love the way these stories come out now. Labour knew about the baby boom and should've been preparing for it before.

I'm serious about tax avoidance though - all the loopholes on tax should be closed.

They new about this baby boom as soon as women started booking their 12 week scans so they have had years to prepare for this. What have the authorities done to prepare for this eventuality? Nothing, nadda.

In my LA (Lab controlled) they announced plans to close a considerable number of primary schools by 2012 due to falling numbers less than a year after this announcement they say more school places are needed surely someone could count...

The last govt. was extending the school building programme to primaries.

They're trying to add an extra form to all of our schools. So they want ours to go from a 3 form entry to a 4 form entry. Which if we had enough outside space etc. I wouldn't mind at all....

Labour criticised over village school closures

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children?s Secretary, said that government rules on surplus places had contributed to decisions to close almost 220 schools with few than 100 pupils since 1997.

Well wouldn't you know it - it's always seemed wrong and short-sighted to close these small village schools which are usually loved by the community and benefit the children with smaller classes. Looks like they'll be re-opening again with parents and companies' (with their own vested interests?) investment and in charge.
Qualified teacher status won't be worth having any more.

Some of the companies and millionaires involved in academies are very dodgy - insisting children are taught creationism as if it is equivalent to evolution, for instance. Is this sort of propaganda now going to start at age 4?

ds's school has been asking the LEA if we can go to two form entry (from 1.5) for years and years. They've always said no, there are surplus places in the town (yeah, at the one crap school out of ten good ones - middle class parents buy their way out of it, it's poorer families who get stuck). We've pointed out, again and again, the town is becoming a magnet for families and the birth rate is going up, too.

Now they've finally admitted we need more school places but have given them to a school that was already two form entry!

My school are adding a bulge class for 2011. We can only have it for one year though, so for 7 years, we will have one three form entry year group. We are quite a big school already, but to accomodate another class is a big ask-new whiteboards/projectors/teacher.
Loads of the schools around are way are having to take it in turns to do it. Apparently they are anticipating having to do it in a few schools per year for the next 8 years.

From national stats for school age children:
There were 669,531 live births in England and Wales in 2006 compared with 645,835 in 2005, an increase of 3.7 per cent. The number of live births has been increasing since 2001 and the number of live births in 2006 reached the highest level since 1993 (673,467).

So it would appear that there were abut 15000 more children born in 2006 than 2005. Does that mean that immigrants have had 335000 children?? Am I being thick?

Also, our local council published the following in their 'strategic plan' 2004-2009, even though it seems national birth rates were rising. Goodness knows how they got these figures, as another doc put out by the same council at the same time offered no projected figures, with the admission that population figures were difficult to predict:

Over the period 2000-2011 children
of primary school age (4 to 10) resident in the County are projected to decline by
6,500, whilst children and young adults of secondary school age (11 to 18)
resident in the County are projected to decline by 800, from a peak in 2005.

They also don't seem to forsee that children currently in primary school will, in the not too distant future, need secondary school places. There is a dire shortage in our area, with many parents digging the LA out of the mire by being pretty much forced to send their children privately.

The figures quoted for secondary school reduction in numbers are probably realistic because the birth rate figures were going down till 2001 and then plateaued for a couple of years, followed by big rises. These children have either just entered secondary or will do in the next couple of years whilst big bulge years are leaving at 16 or 18. Hence a reduction in the level of secondary school pupils now, but from 2014 onwards they will start to rise again I believe.
The figures for primary schools were probably a reasonable guess in 2000 but after 2001 were starting to look rather pessimisic!