Pupil Roll Numbers and School Closures: London

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to take part in a debate under your chairmanship again, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) not just on securing this debate, but on her outstanding opening speech.

I will start with some local pleading. The Minister may be aware of the Avery Hill site, the former university campus in my constituency that was purchased to build the new Harris Academy school. The Minister’s officials do not need to rush; I am not expecting answers today. [Interruption.] Oh, they came prepared—well done! The Minister will recall—I may have written to him in the past—that my concern is about the provision of places, but the Government decided to go ahead with the scheme. It is now on hold, because we lost the contractor for whatever reason—we need not go into that today. I understand that the Department is reviewing schemes such as the Harris Academy. School rolls suggest that we have surplus places for the foreseeable future in Greenwich. My council reports a 10% surplus in year 7 places, and London Councils predicts that between now and 2027, demand for those places will go down by another 2.5%. If the Government are minded not to go ahead with that scheme, may I please have a discussion with the Minister about the future of the site? It is a very important one for my constituency.

On the issue of school rolls generally, I make the same points as everybody else. Because we fund schools by headcount, the impact of falling school rolls can be considerable; as hon. Members have said, it still costs the same to run the school. As one of my headteachers, who does not have a falling roll but has financial difficulties over the next three years, wrote to me:

“This is mainly due to increased salary and pension contributions of all staff, a significant increase in the number of pupils with complex needs who require additional adult support. We have over 20 children out of 400 who have Education Health Care Plans”.

That number is increasing and the needs of those children are becoming more acute. Schools are therefore facing financial difficulties because of factors other than falling rolls.

When a school roll falls, it is not necessarily the case that the costs for the school fall, and we need to have some flexibility around that. I will not elaborate on that, because many people have made excellent points on the issue; what I want to mention is that a big proportion of schools’ costs is staffing costs, which makes it difficult to be flexible when school rolls fall. The Government should not ignore that.

The other, wider issue for us in London is the cost of housing. Affordable housing that families can live in is being hollowed out in central London. That is an issue not just for school rolls, but for the economy. There are people being priced out of London who are essential for certain types of job. We have to address the issue of creating truly affordable rented social housing back where it used to exist, in places such as Southwark where I used to live. I used to play football with friends who went to Archbishop Tenison’s, because Lambeth is not far from Walworth. I remember those schools well, but the places we used to live in no longer exist.

That is the problem that we are facing in central London. We have privatised the provision of social housing. We have relied on private developers to deliver on social housing through planning gain. When we stopped local authorities building houses, we slowed the provision of social houses. Against the loss of those houses being sold, we have hollowed out large parts of London, which has very high land values for social housing. It is a problem not just for schools but for our economy, and it is something that we must address.

The Mayor is doing everything he can. Local authorities are trying to do as much as they can with the resources they have, but this requires a Government willing to step in and make the serious change we need if we are to address population decline in central London. The birth rate is down in London, but it is not down in the rest of the country; I urge the Government to look at the reasons behind that.

I will finish by urging the Government to consider the facts that everyone has set out in this excellent debate. I also ask the Minister to contact me about the Avery Hill site, if he is not going to go ahead with the school.