In the news: are your local primary schools at breaking point?

[KateMumsnet]

Hello all

Research published today by the Labour party suggest that one in five primary schools does not have sufficient capacity for their pupils, with class sizes exceeding the statutory maximum of 30 children, and children being taught in temporary makeshift classrooms. Also in the news today, the Local Government Association is warning that 880,000 extra places will be required in England by 2023, pushing some schools to breaking point.

Is your child's school affected? Are your local schools under increasing pressure? And what's to be done? We'd love to know what you think.

Problems here too, and v white British area with few foreigners to be seen. Massive expansions in primary places locally, they seem to have sorted that now but will be missing 600 secondary places from Sept 16 apparently.

Our local (and preferred) primary school is expanding the intake for September 2016 - unfortunately DS1 is due to start reception this September and we're about on the edge of where the cut-off normally is, so it's touch and go as to whether he'll get in.

We also have building developments nearby - there's plans for something like 100 houses right next door to the already oversubscribed primary school. I think that's why the primary school is expanding, but I agree the council's idea that there'll be 1 extra school place required for every 10 homes seems overly optimistic, certainly in the short term.

I can't help but think that the people most likely to move into new family houses on a new housing development are going to be families needing extra room for a growing family, or couples who are thinking of starting a family at some point in the not too distant future. Or even families hoping to get closer to the oversubscribed school in our case.

Universities, in the main take single students.

I'm talking about the researchers and the lecturers/professors, many of which are foreign and bring important skills to this country. Academia is completely international at this point and effectively restricting to British-only appointments would destroy our international competitiveness. The same is true for engineering, industrial science and so on.

I cannot seriously believe people think that it is reasonable that a highly skilled professional on 60k or 80k or 100k per year (which are good salaries, but often not enough for school fees) should effectively be refused entry to this country.

BTW somebody on 80k per year gets no child benefit anyhow and pays 25k+ per year in tax and national insurance. A typical state school place costs 5k or so per year, so they are more than paying for two children's school places. Asking them to pay 25k+ per year in tax and then giving them nothing back would indeed effectively keep them out of the country.

Incidentally, the issue of my local primary school being oversubscribed has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. The vast majority of people in our village are white British.

The problem is entirely down to the local council giving planning permission to new housing development after new housing development without giving any consideration in advance to the impact of the new houses on the amount of school places required.

mmm170 I'm another one who would have to go private under your enlightened regime, in spite of the fact that I have lived here for over 20 years, have British Citizenship and DH is British. What utter nonsense!

Our council built a housing estate in the catchment of the smallest primary, which was already at capacity.

What did they think- that only retirees and families with teens would move in?

Research published today by the Labour party suggest that one in five primary schools does not have sufficient capacity for their pupils, with class sizes exceeding the statutory maximum of 30 children, and children being taught in temporary makeshift classrooms. Also in the news today, the Local Government Association is warning that 880,000 extra places will be required in England by 2023, pushing some schools to breaking point.

Is this a joke?

I am staggered, Labour can now produce a report on schools being pushed to the brink can they?

The same party who estimated only 13 thousand people from EU would want to come here, and instead, how many have come?

They flooded areas in and around London with immigrants with no proper head count budgets to give them and the communities they moved too support.

What a massive shock for any country to have to bear? Now we are seeing the results of Labours immature and mad and callous and wicked policy.

But now they produce a report.

What about a more through report back then on movement of people and proper staggered stages put in place to expand schools, prop up other facilities, FIRST, First! With budgeting!

Not dump hundreds of thousands of people into areas and say - get on with it.....

We hear the words - schools at breaking point, NHS at breaking point, now things are well....

BREAKING!

What does anyone expect?

Local schools to me are 80% non English as first language?

We are building over play grounds, rapidly expanding local schools and making more room. We are trying to make up ground from a huge shock wave of human movement.

Human movement but with NO budgeting or planning to actually support it.

Children of immigrants are causing the school places shortage?

What utter bollocks. I live in a naice little town, predominantly WASP, predominantly MC, and the only reason our schools are reaching crisis point is that the council keeps approving new housing estates being built - which are then populated by more naice MC WASPs - without building more schools.

The nicer areas here have a primary school place problem. The city most definitely has sink school/estate problems. There are two inner city primary schools which have high numbers of immigrant children but these schools have spaces. The white middle class residential districts have capacity issues here and have done for many years historically. People move in to the catchment area of specific desirable schools to avoid other schools like the plague.

Yep, they've spilled over into portakabins. Hasn't stopped our council deciding it's ok to build another 300 homes in our village with no extra school provision though

well near to me the problem with school places is immigrant families with small children. One school in Nottingham has only one dc whose first language is English ....yes ...1.
We have lots of different East European languages and the LA has to pay for additional staff to teach them English. If you read the whole report it states that over 26% of babies born ( can't just remember whether it was 2013 or 2014) were born to parents who were not British. Don't tell me it's not an issue...it's a big issue here. Some people can't get there child into what they thought of as their local school because of immigrant families moving nearer. It's a political time bomb here.

DS's school has added a buldge class to Reception this year. His school is the only local one with enough room to build the classroom. It is generally a 3 form entry.

This was all communicated to us in June. There have been issues securing teachers for this new class.

The Head madw a comment in passing that there were 83 children on the waiting list for Reception. Not sure if that includes everyone's 6 choices (as opposed to 1st).

We are in East London.

What are the criteria for school places with new homes built?

I live on a new build estate - in the planning docs the council stated there was no issue with school places but that isn't the reality. They are building 100 more houses now. 1 tiny village school on a very small plot - no room to expand. My DD doesn't go there but there is no way all the children from the new housing will fit.

These are 3/4 bed detached family homes - vast majority have 2 or 3 school aged children.

Someone up the thread said the assumption was something like 1 extra school place required per 10 new houses.

I suppose this might be accurate for established housing estates where you get a fair proportion of people whose moved in decades ago and stayed put, but my gut feel is that I would expect new housing estates to have a disproportionate number of young children and school age kids in them. They're going to be attractive to families looking for more room for a growing family, or younger couples who are thinking of starting a family. Whereas pensioners, on the other hand - I know plenty of pensioners who've continued living in the 3/4 bed family home after the children have moved out, but most of the ones I know who've moved house after that, move into smaller properties.

No both primary and secondary have space here (and it makes them grumpy. Less pupils=Less money and we are low down the per pupil funding list to start with).

High house prices and rents have hit rural areas like ours very hard. I've had two lots of friends (5 DCs) move away because they couldn't afforded to buy a house.

And at the other end, people who can afford houses can afford private schools and several DCs started in infants left higher up the school.

I am hopping about the 'no new LEA schools/only new academy or free school schools allowed' law.

We don't have a problem with over subscription of the local schools locally - yet a Gove vanity project has sucked millions out of the education budget for a (massively undersubscribed) free school here. On a TOTALLY unsuitable site. So the poor kids are all in portacabins. millions more £££ needed to build the new school. I guess if funding is linked to pupil numbers they will be a long time waiting.

Oh and the free school has a playground the size of a postage stamp. Possibly shrinking further when school is built depending on the plans.

The politicians who signed this off would not in a million years send their own kids to this school.

mmm your solution would end the shortage would it? And what would you do about all the women in their 40s having babies?

I can see myself spending a lot of time pointing out the born to an immigrant mother statistic is bollocks.

It comes from a tickbox asking if the mother was born outside the UK. Many many British people are born outside the UK and have been since the days of the Empire. It's a nonsense statistics that tells you nothing about immigration and schooling.

it was certainly a problem in one primary we looked at last year in the neighbouring London borough - enough classroom space to bulge but limited playground space and only one hall to do all assemblies, lunches and indoor PE. I think children were starting lunch at 11, which is ludicrous.

Fine in DD's school.

One problem is that faith schools don't have to bulge - the LEA can ask them too but they can say no. So one faith school we visited felt lovely and spacious, with 3 huge halls - but only a 2 form entry.

I live in an area which has seen a baby boom and has also had a lot of kids born because we have a high refugee/migrant population. They decided to increase the amount of reception classes in most of the primary schools near me, unless they were old buildings that were impossible to modify.

Of course - in the more affluent area nearby (The next catchment over) - when the local population was finding that 40+ kids were not getting places in the three very good primary schools which feed into the 'best' secondary school in my city - what did they do...? They put plans in motion to build a brand new primary school. Funny that.

Now there is a facebook group where the parents of those kids who couldn't get a place are stressing over if the new school (Due to be opened Sept 2015) will feed into the the 'good' secondary school because the Council is being very quiet about which Catchment it will be in.

I am in Wales by the way.

Oh, and I had to laugh when a person I was chatting to on a facebook group I am in said there were 17 kids in her child's class. 17! it must be awful for them.