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.

Didn't finish that but maybe just three letters and an indefinite article will do.

Labour is to blame muminLondon. Move on.

But Labour are no longer in power. so what are you going to DO now?

For those suggesting that the Army heavily contributes to the significant lack of school places in some areas, it should be noted that a certain well known supermarket chain employs 3x the number of active army personnel.

You got that right talkin. LAs should have some control over admission policies and pupil numbers too. It's impossible for them to fulfil their duty to deliver places when the system is so fragmented.

Indeed, but when regiments change and move back from overseas bases - with their families and kids and support staff and ancilliary services - it can have a significant impact.
Bases in Germany have 1000 pupil secondary schools that are closing as the families come home

PS
I also think there should be a new version of ILEA : an integrated school application system for all of the schools in central London (as there are in other large cities) so that parents fill out one form with one set of criteria and get allocated a place on the basis of the admissions code looked at holistically across the whole city

Me? It's up to the local authorities. As far as central policy goes, I trust Gove.

I don't like seeing the Conservatives blamed for something which is clearly Labour's fault. I don't think it's fair that pointing out the facts is considered xenophobic and borderline racist. Until you acknowledge the facts you can't possibly understand the problem.

Glad you all get whose fault it is now. Because it's not Michael Gove's.

Yes, there has to be coordination over London. Gove shouldn't keep ignoring all the advice from the NAO, Academies Commssion, LGA, Ofsted, council leaders of all political parties. I didn't even vote Labour last time but Gove is such an irresponsible c

Why would he take advice from the LGA and council leaders when the LG's and councils have helped to f everything up? Ofsted likewise. They probably all just want more money.

I am going to disagree with immigration being the cause of everything. I live in a London borough that is seeing more and more oversubscribed schools. The cathchment in my Dds school has gone from 1.5 miles to 0.2 miles in the last couple of years. I know for a fact there is not one eastern European child in my daughters year. We live in a very middle class 'white' area, the problem here is that people just seem to be having more children. Families with 4 or 5 children are not unusual.

I think posters need to be aware that many housing developers had to agree to pay for new schools if large housing schemes were given planning permission. Housing developers stopped developing when the credit crunch hit, and the projected schools were not built. In my area, a school that was originally due to be rebuilt and nearly doubled in size failed to get the govt funding required, and the developers renegotiated their contribution because they never built a single house. They have now built and the school is now on its way. Quite a lot of rebuilt schools under Labour's scheme were increased in size.

I agree, nancy. Our council very much puts the problem down to migration, not immigration. There has been an increase in Eastern European immigrants into the area, but what has put most pressure on school places seems to be an influx of white British families into the area.

Rather surprised that the infamous "foreign-born" mothers report from 2009 is still being bandied about.

I was one of those "foreign-born" mothers. My father was serving in the British Army and I was born in a British Military hospital in West Germany.

"I am going to disagree with immigration being the cause of everything. I live in a London borough that is seeing more and more oversubscribed schools. The cathchment in my Dds school has gone from 1.5 miles to 0.2 miles in the last couple of years. I know for a fact there is not one eastern European child in my daughters year."

A drop of last admitted from 1.5 miles to 0.2 miles must be something more than a shift in birthrate: that is a 56-fold decrease in area, so unless your local birthrate has increase by five thousand percent and the average woman is having a hundred children (which seems a little unlikely) there must be more to it than that. Has another local school gone into special measures?

It's a huge problem where we live every year they are needing to find another 50 places and are running out of room.

In my area the rising number of children has nothing to do with immigration. Less families are choosing private schools and more families are moving into the area. Our pleasant family orientated town has become a victim of its own success.

Friday16, no schools in special measures.
There are 3 schools within walking distance to me all are given the highest oversted ratings.
The problem this year was siblings, 63 of the 90 places in the year were taken by siblings, of course it is right that siblings get in but it does make the catchment of the school very small if you are trying to get in on distance.
In my daughters year there are 9 sets of twins in one school year, when I was at school twins were rare!
The type of families people are having are changing in this area, there is more ivf so more multiple births and people here are simply having more children.
I'm not against people doing any of these things by the way, I just don't think we should blame everything on immigration

"The type of families people are having are changing in this area, there is more ivf so more multiple births and people here are simply having more children. "

Hmm, that's interesting. Presumably London means more expensive housing which means older parents which means more chance of multiple births. 100 000 more people were born in 1980 than in 1976, and people born 1980-ish are probably the parents of children starting primary school now, and are the generation that moved to London (and the south east) for work. People born 1980-ish are also the beneficiaries of massive expansion in higher education starting 1997-ish, so will be more likely to move to cities (actually, London) for graduate-level work. Very different to this city.

One thing that's been a disaster for school planning (and which makes it hard to blame anyone too much) is that it is impossible to predict, or control, movement of UK citizens within the UK, so if you get a clustering of 30-ish people in one area you have a problem, potentially at short notice. I'd not thought of the siblings problem: if you get a spike in the number of children in an area then the following few years are going to be a nightmare for planners if the sibling rule is adhered to. My children are now at a school which doesn't have sibling priority (selective, so my younger had no extra priority just because my elder was there) so it's not something I encounter.

Friday16,
not just older parents because of income, but also because of second families. There are quite a few parents that had their first lot of children young, those children are now in their late teens, the parents have divorced and remarried and also have young children that are going to school now.
It must be impossible to plan.
As I mentioned above my dd's school has 9 sets of twins in 1 year - yes there would be a record that so many twins were born in that year, but who could predict they would all live half a mile from the same school at the same time?

I don't have any answers to what went wrong, my initial response on this thread was really to a very nasty post that was written about Eastern European migration, which I am pleased to see has been deleted.
Going forward blaming is not going to get us anywhere, some areas need more schools, we need to stop moaning about certain groups stealing all our school places and start looking for fast effective ways to deal with the situation.

"Going forward blaming is not going to get us anywhere, some areas need more schools,"

Well, we need to know why the numbers are up in order to know where the bulge will be and how long it will last for. Three or four miles away in this city there is massive demand with temporary classrooms in playgrounds; near me, several primaries are on life support and there are upwards of a thousand spare places. Ageing local population, more streets becoming de facto exclusively student housing, etc. But is that pattern going to persist for the lifetime of a new school?

Some countries would solve the problem with bussing: then you only need sufficient places at a larger scale, so 1000 spare places here and a 1000 place shortage five miles away is OK. That's not going to be popular in primary in England. But building schools with fifty-year lifespans is very tricky.

Slapping a school in the middle of a new-build estate of houses is superficially sensible, but what happens in twenty years' time when all the children of the initial purchasers of the houses have moved on? People often buy houses near good schools, but they are much less likely to move out just because their children have finished at that school. In my city, there are a lot of 1960s-build schools with falling numbers surrounded by a collar of elderly residents whose children were the pupils at those schools in the 1970s. A generation or two ago, couples in perfect health living in their own houses thirty or forty years after their children finished school, with none of their children (and therefore grandchildren) living with them, would be unusual; not so much today.

there is an estate, nearish where I used to live. built mid 70's with 5 primary schools. when i was leaving one school 1994iish (temporary contract teacher) they were struggling to stay open and there was talk of amalgamation. just checked and there are now 3 schools, some closed in 2005 to amalgamate. I have no idea if they are all full or need extra places. there was definitely talk of falling birth rates.. it took 10 years for them to close though... followed by increasing birth rates..

i am off to look for other schools I taught at.

Is the situation as bad as the media present it?
I'm genuinely concerned, my dd would be starting school in 2016.

I'd welcome views from those with children in schools around Epsom/Ewell, Sutton/Cheam, Streatham. All were named in recent articles as struggling areas but has that been people's experience in reality on the whole?