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.

unilen - I didn't say that 'I' thought this - I said that I had friends who were debating the issues and this seemed to be majority feeling.

I'm in surrey and overall the picture is bleak, the leader has said that they may not be able to guarantee all children a place.

Presumably they are expecting the number of applicants to outweigh the number of places, regardless of how much travelling a particular child has to do. I don't think it will even be a case of a couple of schools having spaces and children being transported. As I understand it there are just not enough places.

The huge immigration into the country must be a factor in the shortage of places nationally.
Whilst you local school may be bursting at the seems and not have any immigrant children if the next school along is full of 'new' children that will put pressure on places on other schools.

I said it up thread, class sizes will be increased and 35 will be the norm.

I can see that it is becoming a major political issues in many areas - particularly parts of London and other big cities.

DD has been at 2 different primaries - both had over 70% EAL, and the vast majority of white children were Eastern European. The parents tend to be bright, ambitious for their children and interested in their education which can only be a good thing overall, but it does cause problems on a practical level as well as affecting people's psychological views (even if perceptions are sometimes worse than the reality)

The area has had a lot of new building - mainly 2-3 bed flats, but in London it's not unusual to have 2 children and live in a 2 bed flat as anything bigger is unaffordable both to buy or rent and you can forget about social housing.

A new and large block of flats going up near a primary school can effectively wipe out the chances of people who live in larger houses further away due to concentration of people on a small footprint. The majority of larger properties here are social housing and are occupied by families who have lived in the area for generations.

There are also 2 very good RC schools which used to take a mix of children of RC parents and a good number of children whose parents were of other faiths or none. A lot of Eastern Europeans are RC and practising and there are now no places for unbaptized children. They also qualify for the 2 local CofE schools by ticking the 'children of other faiths' box giving priority over distance applicants. Long-term locals are fuming - understandable even if you have no issues with immigration.

They can't get their children into the schools where all their friends and relations children have gone and having to travel to schools further away now makes it difficult for granny to pick the kids up and the children now don't have local school friends.

When I was a councillor, by the end of my term, the biggest number of complaints I got from constituents was about lack of school places due to recent immigration or from 'posh people' buying the new flats and being unable to get appointments with the local GPs. When I was first elected, the big issues were housing and transport.

I have no idea what the answer is - even if the money was there, there's no physical space to build new schools round here, most existing ones (bar the faith schools) now have 2/3 form entry and are now taking bulge classes on top.

Perhaps building 5-6+ storey high-rise schools and retaining the postage stamp of outside space is an option.

The fact that some schools are allowed to choose children on religious grounds from further away etc is a key problem imo.

Unfortunately I think it would go down like a cup of cold cat sick if there was any suggestion of making all schools obey by the same rules about taking local children!

Interestingly, about urban/new development school place shortages - apparently this is exacerbated by people being too poor to move out of 2 bed 'starter' homes and flats.

The building of free schools in areas where there was no shortage of places whilst halting LA builds has been an unforgivable piece of mismanagement by the coalition definitely.

There is 25 children in the whole school where my DCs go. 10 of them are Yr 6 so leaving this year with only 3 reception children coming in. Im worried they are going to have to close this one due to not enough children coming in, but it is a small village school in a rural location. I can understand why parents wouldn't want to travel out here though.

We live in a commuter suburb where more and more flats keep on being built. The local schools are massively oversubscribed and yet more old shops and much of the city centre are being demolished (and more betting shops approved to open!) in order to build more flats and .."affordable" shoe-box housing (which goes to whom???).

As for the older generations having attended schools of more than 50 it was because the classrooms used to be a lot bigger. Since then most old classrooms must have been halved in size.

From the unregulated non-stop building and and then sold at extortionate prices everyone suffers. There are not enough school places and neither parking spaces as all the new private developments have not created any parking spaces for their residents who use the council's estate's space. The council want to build even on the green belts right next to us(!!!) where people struggle to walk their children to school every day as "we don't see anybody using the green space"

Mine definitely is. School is already having to increase it's yearly intake from 60 to 90 to cope with increasing demand, which means building on school fields. What's worse is a planning application has been submitted recently to build 400 new houses in the area with only two popular and very oversubscribed schools to support it.

In our area there was some space to build new schools but they preferred to build new or expand old supermarkets all within a few 10s or 100s metres away! And all this because any schools built there they would be ..."near the city centre with too much noise and pollution".

People find it hard to walk to and from school as they give longer time to drivers at the traffic lights and have also removed any islands in the crossings where people could stand and wait as the new supermarkets/giants have priority over our quality of life

pegglebot my experience is that only very few people actually are aware of even complain. My husband was one of a few to complain about the next housing development which will effectively transform our area to a slum while the council was giving away tea and biscuits to residents...

And no councilor or estate officer was present at the event as they had promised!!

Our schools aren't over subscribed at all at the moment. We have surplus in school places, and the council are currently looking at merging and closing some primary and secondary schools.

We have 4 primary schools in our town, which could easily be served by just 2

However, long term, birth rates are up and there will be much more demand for school places in the next few years, but our council aren't very good at anything looking at the longer term. I know what's going to happen, they'll shut a load of schools now and then panic in 5 years time

We have just had 1200 new houses built in our "village."
We still only have 1 dr and 1 dentist, and no large supermarket.
There are 2 primary schools that are now both over subscribed. I am just lunch my Ds2 was born in a relatively low both rate year. Not many EAL kids either so can't blame immigration!
What on earth do these idiots in planning think they are doing?
Signed several petitions to the stop the building...it still happened.
We need another primary school, another pre school and another dr surgery desperately.

itsgoingtoreindeer I think we're only talking about the recent rise in the birth rate, not going back thirty years to blame immigrants for coming over here and taking our school places.

Ironically my dd's school, one of the best in the country, could be under threat due to hugely inflated property prices squeezing new families out of the area. Just down the road IS much more affordable so people move accordingly. So fewer kids applying each year simply because they can't afford to live/stay in catchment. And the village gets greyer by the month : (

To slightly excuse councils - only slightly, mind - they are obliged to come up with new housing numbers. Eg in this area I think it's 20,000 new homes. Of course every village and small town resists this building. Some people are quick to cry NIMBY! but large numbers of squashed-together properties do create huge problems - massively-increased traffic as well as pressure on schools and services, not to mention destroying the character of an area.

I think that in the future we'll have to go the European way and be content to live in flats. The current council rules on numbers of bedrooms in social housing is unworkable unless they're going to start building hundreds of thousands of 6-bedroom houses.

The statistics on immigration speak for themselves. I didn't invent them, they are in the report; and what is the problem with tick box. It is an easy question...."were you born in the UK?"
You only have to look at the increase in the number of votes for a certain political party to see that it is a problem.
If we didn't have large numbers of immigrants from eastern Europe then we would probably have enough schools.
Women having babies in their 40's is not the issue. These women would probably have had the same number of babies anyway....just had them some time ago. I would like some stats from the Government on the number of children born abroad ( or whose parents are born abroad) who are in school at present.

Immigration may be an issue in some areas, yes.

But it's not the only reason for the shortage of school places. As I said before, the problem where I live is down to the local council granting planning permission for new housing developments without increasing primary school provision near the new homes. The vast majority of people in my village are white British, not immigrants. I doubt I live in the only area where disconnected council policies like this have caused problems. And I've seen news articles about this current baby boom in the news for several years now, so the need for extra school places really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in government.

It's not reasonable to throw all the blame on immigrants.

Mmm1701

The reason women having babies in their late 30's/40's is an issue is because there was a dip in the birthrate when people started having babies later. The generation that delayed having babies for education and careers then started having their families. In itself this wouldn't be an issue, but it combined with the younger generation of women deciding not to delay having babies, and so you have 2 generations of women having babies at once.

Obviously that is an overall trend so may not reflect what you see, but a shift for 10% of the population gives 10% more babies. The economic downturn also was said to have an impact, not sure why, certainly for me it was a good time career wise to be on mat leave. Maybe people stayed in and made their own entertainment

Yes immigration has a part to play too. There are plenty of recent immigrants in my town, but I would say proportionately no more than our town had in the 70s and 80s. Saying immigrants should pay for school is inflamatory and unhelpful response. Besides, all the immigrants I know have paid more tax in the last 3 to 5 years than i would guess DH's entire family has ever. (mind you his mother was not born in the UK, maybe we should pay 1/4 of my children's school fees....)

We live in London borough of Sutton. Primary schools oversubscribed, bulge classes in several schools now, playgrounds being built on. So many new residential builds even in just our area. No new schools (or doctors surgeries). It has been reported that Sutton will be short of 3000 secondary school places by the time my DD twins are in yr 7 in 2017. Goodness knows how this will be sorted.

I would really like to see developers having to chip in to create new schools and services. After all, they are the ones that ram in as many rabbit hutch houses/flats (often inapropriately) as possible to maximise profits.

These women would probably have had the same number of babies anyway....just had them some time ago. I would like some stats from the Government on the number of children born abroad ( or whose parents are born abroad) who are in school at present.

But the former is part of the issue - the birth rate was declining for a long time so school places were cut. Then the birth rate jumped, due both to immigration and to women having children later in life.

My children were born abroad but they are British citizens. A number of friends and family also had children while living abroad temporarily. Quite a few of my children's school friends are British, British parents, but were born abroad. Still more children have one British parent and therefore inherit British nationality from that parent, regardless of whether they were born abroad or not. Unless you filter out these children your statistics are going to be meangingless.

So the Labour party have just realised that there is a shortage of school places in some area of the country. They didn't seem to realise this 5 years ago when they were still in government. In fact they were still advising LEAs to reduce the number of surplus places.
In cities such as Bristol an outdated model for predicting the number of school places was being used. This has led to a shortfall of school places.
The birth rate is used to calculate school places and is fairly easy to record, but what is difficult to predict is the number of people moving to a particular area after they have had children. This may not be just immigrants but also expats i.e. British nationals returning to the UK and also people relocating from elsewhere in the country for new jobs.
In the past many families moved out of city centres to more rural areas when their children reached school age. This often meant that there were some spare places that could be taken up by new families moving in. However more families are now choosing to stay living in the cities themselves so this is one cause of the school place shortage. This may be due to housing costs, travel costs or because schools in most cities have improved.
The model also predicted a certain percentage of pupils would go to private schools. The number of pupils attending private schools at primary level nationally has decreased over recent years (may not be apparent from mumsnet though) as school fees have become less affordable. (A large number of parents are saving some fees by opting for state primary and private secondary).