Schools: Closures
(asked on 1st December 2016) - View Source
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many secondary schools her Department has closed in (a) Birmingham, (b) the West Midlands and (c) each region of England since 2015.
Since 2015 seven maintained schools in Birmingham have closed in order to convert to academy status. Since 2015 the following number of schools[1] have opened and closed in each region:
Region | Closures since 2015 | Opened since 2015[2] |
East Midlands | 27 | 24 |
East of England | 35 | 31 |
London | 21 | 38 |
North East | 20 | 19 |
North West | 27 | 31 |
South East | 31 | 36 |
South West | 18 | 24 |
West Midlands | 48 | 55 |
Yorkshire and the Humber | 32 | 37 |
Since 2010, the main reasons for closing secondary schools is to allow a maintained school to convert to academy status [1906 schools]. Other reasons for closure include allowing schools to amalgamate or merge [106 schools] (this requires either the closure of one, or more, schools and an expansion and / or an age range change of another school, or the closure of two or more schools and the opening of a new replacement school), and the complete closure of a school [84 LA maintained schools and 14 academies]. The LA decides whether to close a LA maintained school; decisions on academy closures are made by the Secretary of State.
The Department does not record, centrally, information on the costs of school closures.
[1] Information is taken from EduBase and includes local-authority maintained schools and academies
[2] Includes existing schools that have merged or closed and reopened to change their status and maintained schools which have converted to academy status.