Last week, London Councils published Do the Maths 2014, London's school places challenge. It outlines the problem in the first page of its introduction:
London has been facing an increase in demand for school places for the last seven years, and this demand continues to grow. A combination of rising pupil populations, spiralling building costs and lack of available land is putting increasing pressure on London boroughs to provide places for pupils. These challenges have been compounded in the capital by an ongoing lack of sufficient funding from government to provide adequate pupil places.
The scale of the problem in daunting. London will need to create 112,158 extra primary school places and 20,994 secondary school places by 2018. Currently, individual educational authorities are tasked with planning for and delivering their required additional places at their own borough level. The report makes a number of very interesting points of fact which leads me to think that the only viable solution is one that is centrally planned and pan-London, even regional in nature.
Firstly, the problem is not evenly distributed across the Capital. At one extreme, you have Camden where pupil numbers are forecast to grow by about 6% between 2012/13 and 2017/18, while at the other you have Croydon with growth forecast at over 35%.
Secondly, the Big Society, quasi 'Free-market' approach favoured by the DfE under the now departed former Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, isn't going to help much. Whatever you may think about free schools, the report makes clear that they are not being set up in the areas where there is biggest need for extra places.
In addition, many of the boroughs with relatively high forecast growth rates are next or near to others with much lower expected growth. Lewisham, for example, is expected in the next 5 years to see an increase in pupil numbers of nearly 20%, whereas for neighbouring Bromley the figure is just over 10% and for nearby Bexley its only around 7.5%. Bromley and Bexley are outer London boroughs where London Council's estimate the unit cost of building a school place is about £9,000. In inner London boroughs like Lewisham it's around £15,000.
Lewisham has been dealing with a rising primary school roll for the last 6 years. We have found the extra places in the main by expanding our existing schools, either through adding bulge classes or expanding 2 form entry schools into 3 form entry schools. We have done this because we have so few sites on which we could build brand new schools, even if we had the funding to do so. Bromley and Bexley are far less urbanised than Lewisham and it is therefore hard to believe that they are as pressed for sites as we are.
Some people seem to think that children should have the right to go to a local school, by which they mean one that is just down the road, so expecting parents to allow them to schools in neighbouring boroughs is unreasonable. I think there are a number of points to make here. The first is that parents in London tend not see borough boundaries as restrictions, especially if you live close to them. Parents who live in Lee may see Woolwich, the home of Greenwich Town Hall, as something of a foreign country, but many see Thomas Tallis school, which is in Greenwich Borough and only about a mile or so away, as their local school, especially as the 2 nearest Lewisham secondaries are faith schools. Good transport links are another reason parents are opting to send their children to schools outside the borough. There can be no surprise that parents are happy to allow their children to go to school in Bromley or Bexley or as far away as Dartford in Kent, by train when, if you live in Blackheath or Lee, the journey is quicker than a bus ride to a Lewisham school in New Cross or Forest Hill. Indeed, around a quarter of Lewisham secondary pupils go to schools outside the borough.
I accept that parents are less willing to send their children to a primary school that is not down the road, although this may be more to do with the fact that they have the practical requirement to get them there and bring them back, than it is about an emotional desire to keep their offspring close to the family home whilst at school. However, as I have already said, a neighbouring borough is not another country far away of which we know nothing. From where I live in Lee I can get into my car and be out of the borough and at a farm in Bromley, quicker than I can drive to the Town Hall in Catford.
I don't know the situation in other parts of London as well as I know the issues in Lewisham, but I suspect that there are many similarities. Therefore, it seems pretty clear that the London problem can not be solved by each individual borough trying to deal with its own challenge. But can we expect a solution that involves the outer boroughs and the home counties coming to the aid of the inner boroughs, particularly when in many cases this requires Tory authorities assisting their Labour neighbours by building schools on currently green field sites, to come through a route of cooperation and mutual assistance? I think that whoever is Education Secretary after the next Election is going to have to intervene and direct local government to take action to bear their neighbours' burdens, however much this goes against the grain and whatever the backlash. The problem just seems too big for the current structures to deal with in a way that secures the best outcomes for all the children involved.
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