Severe school shortage of places-what we think?

[mam29]

www.channel4.com/news/education-schools-baby-boom-gove-classrooms-teachers

its all over other news guardian, bbc too .

no surprise?

dident think could get any worse?

media scare mongoring or problem for many.

dd2 starts 2014 and dd3 2015.

was already not feeling confient now a bit less so.

Talkinpeace Singapore does it miles better. The forward planning is awesome. Education, transport, health, land use- all is planned meticulously 20 years ahead.

I know Singapore isn't to everyone's taste, but you can't fault the organisation. One thing amazed me- our local secondary school needed a refit and extension, so the whole school was moved into an empty school less than a mile away for 12 months while all the work was done. They have empty schools around for this purpose. Wow.

Eight years to 2009 - the number of births to foreign born mothers increases by 64 per cent
In the same period, birthrates among UK families rose by six per cent

In the village where I live, there is only me and another family who are immigrants, and the whole area is one of very low immigration, yet the problem of school places is huge.

This is due to the fact that they have built enormous estates and did not allow for any expansion of schools or building of new ones. I am sure the council could have struck a deal with the developers to put some money aside for a school expansion or a new school. Especially where they have 700 houses x 2 different developers in a short period of time.

Our children are crammed, there are 32-35 children in infant classes at the moment and with more building projects in the pipeline, when schools are mentioned this is still not considered "a valid planning point". I am selfishly glad that my children are (nearly) all in primary now, although I envisage this will spiral for secondary too very soon.

I have been involved in many planning meetings and schools are never on the agenda. I have raised it every time and being met with shoulder shrugging - not our problem. The problem is that planning and the education LEA do not communicate - in our area they are completely different entities.

Ultimately is the children and their families who end up suffering, so nobody seems to really care. I spent some time (2 years) in a school doing shifts as described on here and it was a truly miserable experience, I hated every minute of it, so much so that we moved house to escape it (different country).

You have to pay for most things in Singapore, and it has the highest per capita execution rate of any country in the world (Amnesty). It also has tighter border and employment controls, not all of them savoury, and does not give nationality at birth.

Bristol does have a sibling policy so that families living there are guaranteed places at the same Bristol school (even if it is 2 miles away).
The problem arises for families who live in Bristol near the border with neighbouring LEAs e.g. South Gloucestershire. Parents can choose a South Glos. school in this area for their first child but as this LEA puts catchment before siblings, families could end up with dcs at different schools.

Thanks crazy mum dident realise bristol had diffrent policy.

I thourght as they so close they be same.

problem is under new system im sg and apply bristol school I still have to apply through sg which rules are applied sg or bristol admissions?

south glos does have local sibling policy ie if further than 2 miles or not in an area with area of prime responsabilty then eldest not a local sibling so no link we 1.2miles but outside flipping map boundry.

I know lots bristol familes apply for sg schools.
vice versa but mainly at secondry level as no faith seniors in south glos or new acedemies ex public schools.

I know lots angry roman catholics who cant get catholic senior place.

Also sg dont give priority for military yet the huge mod at filton is in sg and many families choose or are placed in mod housing in south glos! Spoken to few cross mod mums, 1 who home educated.

if each la inconsistant and dont plan.

or live close to border and admissions dont match up

can get very tricky.

I don't know talkin what Friday said seems to at least partially support that opinion, even if it is an unpopular one.

What Friday said is quite true
Even with all the rises today, there are still a lot fewer 5 year olds than there were in 1971.
the cities were hollowed out in the 1980s and lots and lots of schools were sold off.
The assumption was that population growth would mirror economic growth.
Instead the Poles (in particular because they are Catholic) brought their girlfriends over and started a baby boom.
BUT
The lack of school places in city centres has been exacerbated by the immigration, not caused by it.
That at the Poles work hard, pay taxes, tend not to claim benefits and have a much better work ethic for themselves and their children than the British.

Another big group of children born overseas are those of service people returning from Germany in their tens of thousands ....

Why are you talking about Poland as if it's the only European country concerned? Was it you who used the word xenophobic earlier? And the servicepeople? Compared to the hundreds of thousands involved in migration you are really stretching it there.

Apparently the pressure was on to reduce places from 2000 to about 2007 because roll numbers were falling then. Nationally the number of 5 year-olds last peaked around 1999 and was way higher in the 1970s (see page 2 of this report). But there are big regional variations.

The Labour government therefore concentrated on rebuilding existing schools although the Conservatives put a stop to that. Gove's free school policy is not targeting basic need - it was not designed to do that - and the policy on all new schools facilitated by councils are that they have to be sponsored academies. So that's a fiasco - it can't deliver places quickly enough, there are problems approving sponsors and planning issues (see Wokingham example) and councils still can't control admission policies or numbers.

Refurbishing existing schools. And they left no money for the Tories to carry on the project.

The Labour government knew they had created the demand for hundreds of thousands of new school places. They were irresponsible in the extreme.

Crumbled
Because Poland was the first of the former Soviet bloc countries to be allowed free movement of labour and tens of thousands of young Polish men arrived to fill gaps in the UK labour market.
They are still the largest group of recent arrival migrants

Long standing immigrants like myself are much more invisible because we have English Accents and English sounding names.

Non caucasian immigrants have been relatively stable in number for many years - despite what the rabid headlines purport.

The Government has absolutely no idea how many people are in the country.
When 10 year visas for permanent residents were introduced to replace ILR stamps, they estimated that 250,000 would be issued
until the US Embassy pointed out that it had more than that number registered as voters in this country.

On average, those of us who have/had ILR status pay more tax than British born.

Did you see the birth rates I posted above? How does that not have an impact on the demand for school places? You must remember, when talking about stability of immigrant rates, that we are not just talking about people entering the country, but births to people who have entered the country.

As for Caucasian and non Caucasian: I don't know why you brought this up: it doesn't interest me: the colour of the people who need school places is irrelevant. But since you do bring it up I assume you will also find this interesting. The stability or otherwise of net migration is overtaken by the fact for example that ,in what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calls "ethnic minorities", large families are more common. (That assessment from the JRT)

Talkinpeace, it's more complex than that (and not at all about Catholic women having lots of babies).

Poland has a staggeringly low birthrate per woman. See here. Like the other post-Catholic countries (Italy, Spain, to an extent Portugal) the birthrate collapsed as soon as the church's influence ended. There's no particular reason to believe that Polish women in the UK are any more enthusiastic about having children their stay-at-home sisters.

No, the reason why immigrants groups have high rates of children is not just about how many babies each woman has. It's also about the demographics of the immigrant group. In the case of A8 states that joined the EU in 2004, the people that emigrated (particularly to the UK, as it did not impose transitional controls) were almost exclusively of child-bearing age. Those that stayed home were disproportionately older.

So if you take 1000 people born in the UK, they will cover the whole spectrum of ages, with the largest single subgroup being those born in 1964, a slow ramp up to that from 1945 and down to 1995, etc. But if you take 1000 people born in Poland who are now living in the UK, very few will be over forty. The fertile women aren't having any more women than the locals of the same age, and probably fewer; but there are more fertile women in any 1000 people.

I doubt there are enough service personnel to make a significant difference, but the same argument would apply: most servicewomen, and wives of serviceman, are of child-bearing age, and therefore they will have more children than the same number of people drawn from the general population.

There are immigrant groups who have a markedly higher TFR, such as the Pakistani and Bangladeshi community, although their age profile is broader (a lot of older people). But that is not the case with Polish, or (so far as I recall) any of the other A8 countries.

We are where we are.
What would you do about it?
Or are you one of those fragrant types who want to send us all "home"?
As an empty Britain will have no shortage of school places, but also no economic clout.

"The stability or otherwise of net migration is overtaken by the fact for example that ,in what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calls "ethnic minorities", large families are more common. "

The assumption is that over a couple of generations, birthrates within ethnic groups tend towards the national average.

that was to Crumbled BTW
but its all academic : the kids are here,
What policy needs to change to get schooling that turns them into taxpayers?

Excuse me talkinpeace - are you accusing me of saying I want to send people home? Why? I have said nothing of the sort. It may suit you to make these accusations as a way to discredit what I've said. But they are facts. I've made no judgement, except on Labour who created this shortage.

I've only given you these facts because you sought to deny them. They are facts. You cannot deny them.

Friday16: we are not a couple of generations away.

Crumbled
except on Labour who created this shortage
but the old school buildings in the city centres and the depopulation of the city centres happened long before 1997 ....

and the single market started before 1997 - which is why the EU migrants are here

and the abolition of proper exit controls at the UKs borders was in the early 1990's

and blaming a past Government will not cure the problem ...

the old school buildings in the city centres and the depopulation of the city centres happened long before 1997
That's been explained to you by Friday.

As regards EU migrants, even Labour have admitted they should have used stronger transitional controls. As you know, it's not just about the single market. You know that - I am teaching a grandmother about egg-sucking here.

It may not cure it but blaming the Tories means you haven't even found the source of the problem, let alone start to address it.

It's irresponsible for Gove to blame Labour when he's wasted £1 billion on academy privatisation conversion, £60 million on start up costs for free schools, paying off £4 million of the debt of a failing private school in the NE. He's c

Free schools are not the answer
Abolishing LEAs is not the answer
Academy chains are not the answer
what IS needed is
-a statutory requirement on local authorities to provide enough school places for the number of new houses in their area

• a statutory requirement to ensure that no houses are outside all catchments

freeing councils to open schools where they are needed would deal with it
BUT
both political parties are so in hock to the management consultants that they have fallen for the Academy model