Crisis for families as 84,000 fail to get preferred school place

More and more families are failing to win their preferred choice of secondary school for their children, according to new research published by Labour.

Last year 84,000 families did not get their chosen place, a rise of over 7,000 on the previous year. The number is expected to increase as demand for places increases.

Year six students will find out which secondary school has offered them a place tomorrow.

Around one in seven (14.4 per cent) of secondary schools are over capacity, with 0.6 per cent currently at their upper limit of students. There will be 303,000 extra students in secondary education by the end of the parliament, an equivalent to an extra 91 students in every secondary school, it is forecast.

Two in five councils forecast they will have more primary-age pupils than school places by September. This increases to more than half in 2017 and three in five in 2018, according to the Local Government Association.

The government’s education policy since 2010 has removed local authorities’ powers to increase the number of places in academies. It is increasingly difficult for councils to build new schools that are not free schools. Free schools require a sponsor, so new schools emerge where sponsors can be found and do not respond to the need for places.

Lucy Powell has condemned the Government’s lack of provision:

“The Tories’ free market approach to providing new school places just isn’t working and is creating a crisis in school places. With such big rises in demand and one in six secondary schools already at or over capacity, the provision of new places needs proper planning and co-ordination.

“Yet this Government’s fixation with Free Schools, which can be opened where there is no shortage of school places, has made it harder and harder to ensure there are enough good school places in every local area.

“It is time for Ministers to reinstate local input on planning for new places and remove the bureaucracy that councils face when it comes to opening and expanding schools. Families deserve a better approach to planning for school places, otherwise we will continue to see many more children crammed into over-large class sizes and learning in unsuitable spaces.”

The Conservatives promised to create “small schools with smaller class sizes” in their 2010 manifesto. Labour predicts the number of secondary schools bigger than 1,600 pupils increase by more than a third over this Parliament, whilst the number bigger than 2,000 could increase by two thirds.