Pupil Roll Numbers and School Closures: London

David Simmonds Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Hollobone. I too congratulate the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing the debate. We have a shared history as councillors in London and as parents of young children, so this issue is close to our hearts. I will touch on the recent history of school place provision in London, outline some of the emerging challenges that I hear about in my constituency—especially, as the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) mentioned, the emerging challenge in respect of SEND places—and briefly make some suggestions that the Department may find helpful in resolving those challenges.

When I was first elected as a councillor in Hillingdon just over two decades ago, the council was seeking to open a new school, which is thriving today as Ruislip High School. It was built on green-belt land, and local residents were concerned because they recalled that, just a decade or so earlier, the council had closed Southbourne Secondary School in south Ruislip, not far from the new school, because at that time there was a massive over-supply of school places.

There has been a long history in the capital of variations in the number of children, which goes through cycles. When my local authority engaged with the Building Schools for the Future programme, under my leadership as cabinet member for education, it was a condition of Hillingdon’s entry that at least one secondary school per constituency be closed to reduce excess capacity. By the time we were a year or so into that programme, we looked at it again with a view to increasing places significantly, because the live birth data supplied by the NHS demonstrated that the demand for places, although relatively low in the immediate future, would rise rapidly.

The need to plan strategically has been a current issue in all our constituencies for a good long time. The number of pupils grew swiftly following the late 2000s financial crash, hit a peak following a massive expansion in school capacity across the capital, and has begun to tail off in recent years. That initial expansion of school capacity across the capital was primarily led in its early years by local authorities, which fulfilled their statutory duty to ensure that every child who wants and needs a school place can be offered one in their local area.

As time has moved on, we have seen increasing reliance on central control from the Department for Education, as additional capital funding has been moved from local authorities and expansion funds have instead been primarily routed through the free schools programme. A welcome feature of that programme is the significant increase in the number of children attending schools that are good or outstanding, which we often hear Ministers talk about. The fact that the funding was restricted over that time to schools that were already good or outstanding has been positive, as it ensured that in-demand schools could expand, but the reduction in the number of places creates a challenge because the geographical concentration of the surplus places is different from where demand is.

With some of the schools that have been expanded—in and around my constituency and serving some of my constituents I know of schools such as John Locke Academy, Lake Farm Park Academy and St Martin’s—the local authority built the school, ran a bidding process to find a free school provider to deliver the education in it, and ensured that the additional places, when they were required, were delivered on time and on budget in the locations where there was a great deal of demand. Those schools continue to thrive to this day.

When it comes to the emerging challenges, London Councils has done some excellent work to highlight not just the impact that we all hear about as constituency Members of Parliament but what they mean across the capital. Over the same period of time as pupil numbers have been dropping, we have seen a number of changes to the schools funding formula, which has tightened so that there is comparatively much less scope today for a local authority and the schools forum of local schools that work together to support schools with declining numbers—unless there is clear evidence that the surplus places will be used again within the next three years.

Local authorities that use birth data and child-registration data from the local NHS tend to have extremely good visibility of what the numbers are, but by its very nature that data is limited to the point at which the child is born at a local hospital or registered with a local GP as a new mover into the area. Broadly speaking, therefore, we are talking about a five-year time horizon for when we can be accurate about that.

As the hon. Member for Vauxhall alluded to, there has been much debate about why the child population of the capital has been reducing. The data from the Office for National Statistics clearly shows that there is a reducing birth rate, which is having an impact. Anecdotally, schools have told me that increased family mobility as people seek bigger homes outside the capital at affordable prices, and Brexit in locations with a high level of rental accommodation that was regularly occupied by families from the European Union who are no longer coming here, have had an impact on the numbers of children coming through their doors. But the challenges are manifesting not just in inner London: those of us in the suburbs are seeing a significant impact. For example, according to London Councils figures, in the London Borough of Hillingdon we are seeing a decline of around 15% in overall numbers—one of the highest rates in outer London.

Why does this matter? Why does this situation create such a challenge, given that these things are part of the normal warp and weft of population change? Looking at the figures, it is fairly clear that the funding formula, whereby almost all the money a school receives comes based on pupil numbers on a per capita basis, means that a class needs to be full or nearly full to break even.

Let us take the example of two schools in my constituency: Cannon Lane Primary School in Harrow, and Bishop Winnington-Ingram Church of England Primary School in Hillingdon. According to Department for Education figures, Cannon Lane receives £4,249 per annum per child and Bishop Winnington-Ingram receives £4,816. It costs around £60,000 with on-costs to put a teacher in the classroom, and two teaching assistants on top of that are a further £60,000 with on-costs. A share of the school’s overheads will pretty quickly get us to £150,000 to £180,000, meaning we can quickly understand that if a school does not have a nearly-full class, the amount of money coming in per child will not add up to enough to break even for the school’s budget.

Schools that face significant demand for places, but where that demand is less than is needed to fill a class, are going through a process of reducing their planned admission number or PAN—the stated capacity of the school.

[Munira Wilson]

The hon. Gentleman is making a well-informed speech. On that point about pupil admission numbers, it is my understanding—I am happy to be corrected—that if a school has a published plan of 60 and 45 parents put down that school as a first choice, those 45 places have to be granted and therefore the school has to open two classes, even though it is only one-and-a-half classes full. As a result, the school ends up with the shortfall in cash that the hon. Gentleman has outlined.

Does the hon. Gentleman think that, as well as some of the strategic planning powers I talked about for local authorities, there needs to be an interim measure whereby the Department for Education provides some sort of additional funding or grant for those classes that are not full? Schools in my constituency are asking parents for money for glue sticks and to be in sports teams, and are cutting teaching assistants because they are struggling so much financially.

[David Simmonds]

The hon. Member makes a good point. We also see the converse of the situation in which a school has fewer applications than it has places, and this creates additional pressure on places: rather than maintaining a PAN of 60 with 45 applications, a school makes a decision to reduce its PAN to 30, which means that 15 children who want to be in that school but do not have a place are put somewhere else in the system. I will discuss later a way in which we might be able to address that.

Within the context of reducing pupil numbers, we are consequently seeing significant localised pressure on school places where local authorities are still having to look to expand schools to meet demand. There has always been a need for some spare capacity—5% was the traditional rule of thumb to allow for normal fluctuations —but because we have seen the loss of many of the strategic levers that local authorities could use for planning that, we now see a hotch-potch of situations in which some schools remain under acute pressure to find capacity for more children while others relatively close by struggle for numbers and reduce their planned admissions number.

From a parent’s perspective, everything seems absolutely fine if their child is the one that gets into their school of choice. If that school has reduced its planned admissions number from 90 to 60, but their child is one of those 60, that is fantastic. But if someone’s child is one of the 20 that cannot get in, they are displaced to a school that is not of their choice. That situation creates unhappy children and a financial challenge for the system, which tries to find another place for the children to go.

None of this is helped by the fact that although councils have no control over the dedicated schools grant—the ringfenced budget that funds schools—it is still legally part of councils’ budgets, so a duty is imposed on them to ensure that over a period of time the dedicated schools grant breaks even. I know Ministers have been working on that with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which has overall responsibility.

We see the converse of this challenge in respect of SEND places. The Timpson reforms represented an enormous transformational change in the approach to SEND education across the whole country. The downside is that the huge expectations that were raised by the reforms—particularly the extension to the mid-20s of the age entitlement for young people to access education and training—did not come with sufficient funding to ensure that they were delivered in reality. That is one reason why we see such enormous pressure on SEND in the capital.

Audit data from the London boroughs on the children who are given education, health and care plans and those who have some form of diagnosis demonstrates that the decisions are entirely the right ones. The children are meeting the relevant tests and criteria for the NHS, educational psychologists and so on, so the levels of need are undoubtedly being correctly assessed. We can see councils across the capital—I certainly include in this Hillingdon and Harrow, which serve my constituents—that are enormously challenged by rising demand against a backdrop of the reforms not being funded in line with the expectations that families now reasonably have.

There are many small, specialist SEND providers in the capital—for example, Sunshine House in my constituency—that are very popular with parents. They can offer a very high-quality service, but they are also often extraordinarily expensive, with a single place funded by a local authority not infrequently costing in excess of £1 million a year per child.

The delivery of the additional capacity that we require has been quite slow in the centralised programmes compared with the council-led ones. In my constituency we have seen additional SEND place capacity created through the local authority, such as the Eden Academy and specialist resource provision at other schools, all delivered on time and on budget. But some of the larger free school programmes, which are to deliver the bulk of the additional places we need, are many years behind where they need to be. Although there might be good reasons for the delays—we all understand the period of covid—the reality is that they impose massive cost pressures on our DSG high-needs blocks.

Although safety-valve agreements are being reached at individual local authority level, we need to recognise that the failure of programmes to deliver places on time, even if they eventually arrive, is the main reason why we see such a high level of pressure on the DSG across London for SEND. We know that the in-borough SEND—the state school places—is significantly cheaper than the private sector provision, but the awaited reform of SEND financing cannot come soon enough to make sure that the cost pressures are eased and that parents and children’s expectations can be met.

Let me conclude with some ways forward. I know there has been some consultation on this matter, but my first ask of the Minister is that we look at the enhancement of local authority flexibility to allocate budgets much more strategically in order to ease the way forward, especially when schools go through a transition period of downsizing. Rather than a sudden step from 90 children down to 60, which has a huge impact on the ability of parents to get their kids into a school, as well as a major financial impact on the institution itself, we should smooth that process out and recognise the fluctuations in rising and falling demand.

My second ask is for greater powers for local authorities to strategically plan, recognising that in the context of falling rolls there are areas of growing demand, not just for SEND but mainstream as well. There is an urgent need to be able to direct the overall school-planned admissions number to ensure that the provision matches the demand in a local area.

My third ask is that we do not forget that London is likely to see its population increase again at some point in future. We know that our capital’s population is smaller at the moment than some of its past peaks, that the density of the population has been reducing and that the crowding has been dropping for decades, but it will almost certainly begin to rise again in due course. To facilitate that, multi-academy trusts should be prohibited from selling or disposing of any land or closing sites without the agreement of the local authority that has the legal duty for school places in the area.

I finish by thanking London Councils, and in particular the leader of one of my local authorities, Councillor Ian Edwards, who is the lead member for children’s services at London Councils, along with the officer team that have been supporting him. I place on the record my thanks to the leaders and members in Harrow and Hillingdon, particularly Councillors Hitesh Karia and Susan O’Brien, for their work. I also thank the hon. Member for Vauxhall again for securing the debate on this important issue.

On a positive note, this is an opportunity for us to thank the teachers and councils of London for the work they have done to ensure that this remains, to this day, one of the best cities in the world in which to get an education.

[Several hon. Members rose—]