Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their estimate of the number of state-funded schools that had cohorts that were at leat 20 per cent smaller in the January of year 11 than they had been at the start of year 7, in each of the past five academic years.

School level data giving the number of pupils by school year has been available as underlying data of the annual statistical release ‘Schools, Pupils and their Characteristics’[1] since 2012. Thus it is possible to provide figures for two cohorts: the cohort which was in year 7 in January 2012 and year 11 in January 2016 (cohort A), and the cohort which was in year 7 in January 2013 and year 11 in January 2017 (cohort B).

The comparison was made between matched secondary schools who had pupils in both years (so not, for example, 14-16 schools or middle-deemed schools)[2]. Of these, 28 out of 2,629 schools in cohort A and 45 out of 2,720 schools in cohort B had a total number of pupils in year 11 at least 20 per cent smaller than had been the case in year 7.

[1] Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-school-and-pupil-numbers, underlying data document, Schools_NCYear_UD dataset.

[2] Only schools which could be matched between the two censuses were able to be included. Schools sometimes change their identification codes, for example when converting from an LA-maintained school to an academy, and in these cases the school present in the 1^st census could not be identified in the 2^nd census and matched. This was the case for 351 pupils in cohort A and 326 schools in cohort B.