In the last six weeks, I have had three meetings with different London Boroughs where discussions on public land have turned to primary schools. All three are faced with the prospect of closing down schools not due to poor performance but because there simply are not enough kids anymore. Guardian analysis over the weekend confirms it isn’t confined to one or two places. Their analysis identified 88 primary English schools were more than two-thirds empty last year.
In my conversations with Councils, we’re not talking central London, it’s the zone 2/3 Boroughs which are residential in nature and not commercial which are under the most pressure. The Guardian analysis bears this out, almost half of the schools in inner London had fewer pupils in 2021-22 compared with 2009-10.
As money is paid per head, this is a big problem. Schools are simply running out of funds.
So where have all the kids gone? To my eye, there is a clear trend where Boroughs begin to exceed £700/ sq ft they disconnect with the local population. The result is more transience and a premium on space which takes out the middle market and families from the local area.
This is borne out of academic research. According to one recent study, after controlling for other factors, a 10% rise in house prices was associated with a 1.3% fall in overall births.
It hammers home the need for integrated policy. Building more schools if you’re not building more homes doesn’t make sense. Perhaps pet policies such as Free Schools which severed the Local Authority from school creation were not so smart in the context of integrating population needs with new homes and growth.
We also need to think again about how we use space and public land. I am increasingly of the view that we need to explore more high-density family typologies where possible on public land. I think there is a huge opportunity to achieve this in places like Meridian Water in latter phases. Moreover, there is now big argument for co-living and sharer models on well-connected private land coming forward to maximise their use rather than losing existing family housing stock.
Trends will not reverse quickly. People still want to have families but we as a society need to figure out how we use the limited land we have left to enable dense development that works for everyone.
As a postscript, none of the Boroughs I spoke to wish to sell their school sites and hope they will come back to use! I hope so too.
