Shortage of school places set to worsen

[mrz]

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/16/michael-gove-shortage-primary-places

it's so awful isn't it, people are getting turned away here to schools out of borough and the existing primaries are having to turn over their fields to build more classrooms.

his priorities are all wrong, agree with the comment on there that the educational professionals should be allowed to sort this out rather than politicians :(

DD's school has already got 2 portakabin classrooms, there's no room for any more as they take up about half of the (already relatively small for the size of the school) playground.

There were over 400 applications for 60 places in the current Reception class. The council added 8 bulge classes in total last September, they have already announced a further 5 bulge classes for this September but will need more.

It's a complete mess, and nobody seems willing to do anything about it.

Our LA has finally taken the bull by the horns and is looking to invest £12.5m and create 1200 extra primary places in the city (where there is currently a shortage of school places in certain areas). There are similar consultations taking place across the county, but we are a rural county and the problems experienced here are nothing compared to places like Bristol and London. I remember watching the schools admissions threads last year and I felt for so many parents and children - the situation is getting worse year on year.

It's an absolute sodding disgrace and it makes me want to scream and rant and rave. And still the problem is getting relatively little press. The London borough I'm in had a shortfall of about 500 primary places last year apparently and that's with lots of bulge classes (portacabins in car parks not actually in the school grounds in one case). We don't need free schools, we just need schools. And I can't even begin to think about what this means when these primary intake kids end up trying to get into secondaries.

This is an attack by Mike Baker on one of his favourite topics - free schools. I don't like the concept and I don't think that they will actually solve many problems but they are not the reason why we have a problem with school places. The problem is a lack of proper planning by Local Authorities over many years. In my area the low point in birth rate was in 2001, not 2009 that Mike Baker talks about. Four years later those children are entering the school system and given that we have seen continued slow growth since 2001 it does not take a genius to work out that more school places are necessary.
The present government has put in £500M and then £1.5b to ease the pressure on school places. At an average build cost of £150,000 per classroom for 30 pupils, that should mean 200 school places per £1M or 400,000 school places in total which should go a long way to resolving the problem.
The only problem is that very few of these places exist now and most will not exist in September, so my question is a very simple where has all the funding gone and why are we not seeing lots and lots of building projects on the go for new schools and permanent extensions at existing schools?

Unfortunately the solution that Gove may well go for is to increase class sizes.

The supply of the right number of places isn't something one needs an educational professional to sort out. This is straightforward demographic profiling. It's not exact as people move around, councils do not automatically know which households have children, hospital catchments don't match council areas. But pretty good estimates can be made.

The role of DofE in this is surely limited to ensuring LAs are doing this profiling and planning, and in having a dialogue about costs, which aside from the fiasco of BSF are normally LA responsibility.

LAs took the financial benefits of school closures during the low-birth rate years - which also co-incided with the economic boom - and now has to restore them during a down turn. This is going to be tough.

I know this is "bash Gove" week - but I think on this one, it's the LAs which need to be in the firing line. The latest legal review about class size limits was brought by an LEA.

Governments over the years , including the last Labour administration have access to predicted birth rates , predicted school numbers and have done nothing about the need for extra school places .

We need the politicians to sort it out as the money to the coucncils for extra school will have to come from central governement.

we're 3 miles outside of the city - so in a different LA - where they have a shortage of places and are going to be building new primaries, new classrooms etc at a cost of millions of £, however the small local rural schools like our are about to have to get rid of a class and make several redundancies.

We're down on numbers for the next few years because of a smaller number of children in the area of school age, and we can see from the projections that in a couple of years we are going to be oversubscribed again (it's an Outstanding School).

There's no joined up thinking - there are lots of places available, and because of location it would be quicker to get the children out to us rather than to a new school on the other side of the city, and a darn site cheaper to provide transport compared with new buildings. Sadly it's not going to happen because of an imaginary line on a map

There was a problem in our town last year. All the school places were filled, even the school that is in special measures and there were a couple of people who were being told they had got a place in the next town for their 4 year olds and the council(?) Were providing taxis. The taxis were going to cost more than fees to the independent school in the town.

Luckily one school managed to take two reception classes and apparently have the space to do so again.

In DD's preschool, there are 36 children moving up to reception in September. The majority of those will want a space at the adjoining school as well as others coming from other nurseries/preschools. We risk not getting a place despite being actually attached to the school due to so many siblings moving up this year, as well as some church spaces. You just assume you will get in being the closest house to the school with children in!

Councils want central government to provide more taxpayers money - but did those who sold off school buildings/land in the 00s return the profits to the centre? There is local responsibility here too.

Yes, and of course central government has always set such a brilliant example when it comes to selling things off and reinvesting the money, hasn't it?... Oh no, sorry, silly me. And then there's the freedom it gives LAs to do what they want with their dwindling funds, provided they do a, b, c, d, e and f according to the whims of the current administration, first.

I agree that, in London at any rate, free schools are not really relevant either way as the ral problem is finding a site to put a new school on. In Haringey a free school is opening, and the council's view is that any antipathy they may have to the concept of a free school is out wieghed by the need for places...

Is it true that the new Education Act prohibits LA schools being built - any new school has to be an academy or free school?

No it does not. However, if the LA believes a new school is needed it is required to first seek proposals for the establishment of an academy. If no proposals are made or approved the LA can then go ahead and build the school itself. There are also some other circumstances in which the LA can build a school.

I should note that the legislation passed by the previous government already limited an LA's ability to build new schools. Most proposals needed approval by the Secretary of State and the legislation makes it clear that there is a strong preference for the school to be established by someone other than the LA.

That's pretty much de facto, by the sounds of it then. Given the number of academy chains rubbing their hands with glee at being able to syphon millions of pounds of tax payers into their own coffers, it's not looking like there won't be proposals.

And before anyone comments that schools can be run by 'charitable trusts', let's just consider ARK, an academy chain that likes to benignly describe itself as a 'charitable trust' and indeed the ARK schools don't actually make any profit. What ARK is less open about is that it also owns a number of profit-making subsidiaries eg teacher training, construction who are making a very tidy profit out of having purchasing power in schools.

The new Head of Ofsted is an ex-Director of ARK. The new Chair of Ofsted is Sally Morgan who continues to work as an advisor to ARK. This is a clear conflict of interest.

But this is all about improving standards, of course.

Oh, look, the London Council also have grave concerns about this...

www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/news/current/pressdetail.htm?pk=1447

Just in case anyone is still labouring under the DfE's illusion that academies are some kind of magic wand, the Financial Times informs us that 8 secondary academies have had to be bailed out at the cost of nearly £11 million.

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/60ecf0c4-3864-11e1-9d07-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1jttN8e6E

That's in addition to the many that are now failing academically.

Rosebud,
Yes there will be academies that will financially fail as there will academies that fail academically, that is the nature of schools. There are plenty of maintained community schools that are in deficit at present at the kind of levels that this report highlights. The only difference is that the LAs are in effect bailing them out and "allowing" the school to run a deficit budget for a period of three years whilst they sort themselves out.
Honest answer is that many schools are financially not very good and this has always happened since Local Management of Schools was introduced and will continue to happen until there is good financial management in schools.

And it's definitely looking as though rapid expansion of the academy programme is not going to be the answer, I'd say.

THis is wrong. ARK Schools is a charity and has no intrests in consrtuction (where dies this stuff come from) nor does it have an interest in "profitable teacher training". What it does to is take on underperforming schools in aras with high levels of economic disadvantage and work with them to create outstandin schols tha raise ttainment for children from less priviledged backkgrunds and give them the chance to go to universities. You;d think nnn-controversial. In response to the widely acknowledged proble of a looming gap in leadership large numbers of head teachers reaced retirement age and the widely agreed limits of existing leaership training ARK Schhools co founded and developed teaching Leaders, a very successful programmeto support teachers devloping the right skills for school leadership particularly in inner city schools again uncontroversial and pretty essential. Third it hs no interest in construction but has project managed the builing of several of its new schools, working with ocal authorities, PFS an BFS and local economic partnerships set up by councils. If youo want to build schools and ensure tht you get what you need out o the building you'd be folinsh not to have a projct mangement team.