Empty classrooms

This week: Why shrinking pupil numbers could be an opportunity for schools, (and houses), and some maps showing quite how much the Elizabeth line has changed the geography of London.

Hello everyone. I warned when I started writing the newsletter again after my recent bereavement that there might be weeks when you’d still see a guest post in your inbox. This is one of them: everything’s just got a bit on top of me, so my lovely friend and education journalist Freddie Whittaker, has stepped into the breach to write about for the lead slot. Beneath that, however, you’ll still find some home-made maps I made earlier, which show exactly what the Elizabeth Line has done to London, plus all the usual links. I’ll be back with a full newsletter next week. 

Heeeeeeeeeeere’s Freddie!

An empty classroom. Technically it’s in Serbia, but it’s a sort of metaphor thing, okay? Image: Dobrislava/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0.

In 2015, David Cameron (remember him?) promised to open 500 new free schools. Michael Gove’s take on the US Charter School model was now a flagship manifesto pledge. Fast-forward almost a decade, and we’re on the cusp of a national conversation about the need for fewer, not more schools. So what happened?

The pledge in 2015 wasn’t about the free schools model per se. Yes, the Conservatives liked the idea of allowing communities, maverick headteachers, and journalists (yes really) to open new schools. But the pledge was also necessary, given Gove had removed almost every other mechanism to open a new school, and England faced a demographic shift.

Pupil number projections from that year show how the baby boom of the 2000s, which had by then already created much greater demand for primary places, was about to kick-start a sharp rise in secondary-age pupils, too.

Between 2010 and 2022, pupil numbers in England rose by 12 per cent. Children were, indeed, the future.

Now we have the opposite problem. Last year, the government predicted numbers will fall by the same proportion by 2032, revising down its prediction in the face of “notably lower birth projections”. There is a reason why the latest free schools wave, announced this week, focused on 16 to 19 education, a part of the system that will still see growth for several years to come.

London offers us a glimpse of the future here. In the capital, pupil numbers started dropping earlier, with councils blaming a combination of Brexit, Covid and soaring housing costs for emigration, particularly from inner boroughs.

As a result, areas like Lambeth, where almost three in ten primary places are now going spare, are considering amalgamating schools.

But this is a far less difficult prospect in London and other urban areas than, say, parts of the countryside where the next nearest school is an hour by bus.

According to SchoolDash, there are 20,198 pupils in 143 neighbourhoods of England who have no non-selective secondary school within 10 kilometres (around 6.2 miles) of their home.

Sparsity funding – extra cash given to the most remote schools – and falling rolls cash will have to become more generous to sustain small rural primary schools that would otherwise shut.

There is also a danger that, given the pace of demographic change, people who want to work in education will be forced out by redundancy, at a time when we are still crying out for teachers.

All of this brings us to the central choice facing whoever wins the next election. Schools are predominantly funded based on the number of pupils they have.

If the number of pupils falls, so, by rights, should a school’s total budget. But after years of underfunding, surely it's sensible to explore keeping the total where it is, and letting per-pupil funding increase as numbers fall?

That could allow schools to reduce class sizes, start to fix their creaking infrastructure and make inroads to address the deep unfairness faced by children with special educational needs, for example. After what feels like an eternity of ministers being dragged kicking and screaming into providing piecemeal uplifts in school funding, lurching from crisis to crisis, some stability wouldn’t go amiss. 

It probably isn’t quite as simple as that. But it should absolutely be on the minds of Labour staffers currently trying to cobble together a more coherent set of education policies. It seems inevitable this will become their problem: they will need a solution ready. 

After all, we don’t know when another population bulge might occur.  Pupil numbers were roughly the same in the mid-1970s as today, falling again in the 1980s and 1990s and then rising again since the late-2000s. 

There are decisions to be made about land vacated by closing schools, too. Many school buildings are literally falling to bits: some were built, we learned recently, from a type of concrete reassuringly described as “crumbly”. In 2019, two-fifths of teachers responding to a Teacher Tapp survey said their school had buckets set up to catch leaking rainwater. Yet capital spending has not kept pace with what is needed. The current rebuilding programme is a fraction of the size of what’s required (whatever happened to Building Schools for the Future?). And cash for routine maintenance is difficult to get hold of. 

To quote the regular author of this newsletter, we also desperately need to Build More Bloody Houses. Doing so on vacated school land is a logical way to raise much-needed capital – but it would surely be a mistake to simply abandon that land to the private sector. 

We know school staff themselves are among those feeling the negative effects of decades of regressive housing policy. If only there was some form of housing that was built and maintained by the state for those least able to afford private rents, and whose income is ploughed back into the public sector. No, I have no idea either…

Hello, it’s Jonn again. From this point on it’s all me. 

Map of the Week: Painting London Purple Edition

A few months ago, I found myself idly regretting the fact that the Elizabeth Line, the near mythical “Crossrail” that I had been waiting for nearly 30 years, had finally arrived and that I rarely had a reason to use it. Then the unthinkable happened, I moved back to my family home in Gidea Park to sort myself out for a bit, and I realised I was spending half my life on the new line, and now I find myself idly wondering if maybe I’d unwittingly picked up a cursed monkey’s paw from somewhere and just not realised it.

Anyway: we find the positives where we can, and something this experience has shown me is that, if you’re lucky enough to live near to the route, the new line really does change the geography of London. Here’s a rough and ready map of the bits of central London within half a mile of an Elizabeth Line station, and so probably (it depends on the exact street pattern and so forth) within not much more than a 10 minute walk. Where a station has an entrance at either end of the extremely long platforms, I’ve tried to include both.