Comment by Joe Faulkner – Head of Marketing and Business Development
A modern baby boom has been cited in yesterday’s Telegraph as factors leading to a ‘critical’ shortage of primary school places in some areas of England and Wales. We ask if the real issue is more a question of insufficient planning.
The article, by the paper’s Education Editor Graeme Paton, details an internal Labour party report suggesting that at least 60,000 additional primary places are required this autumn alone, while Professor Smithers of Buckingham University indicates that it is “highly probable” that the number of children educated in classes of over 30 pupils would exceed 500,000 next year.
What, perhaps, is most startling about this shortage of places is the apparent lack of planning, either at Local Authority or Central Government level. As rightly pointed out by Prof Smithers, children entering primary schools this September will be four years old, meaning that authorities have had at least four years to cater for their primary education.
And planning should have been in place long before this. In almost every commercial market, demographic trends and long term planning for population change forms a crucial part of development strategies. Indeed mtmconsulting’s own ‘Mandarin’ research for schools provides scientific and robust projections for population change, by region, for the next ten years.
Further indicating a lack of proper foresight are figures from the Office for National Statistics, which clearly show that birth-rates for England and Wales have been increasing since as early as 2001, when the rate was as low as 595k.
Birthrates have increased since 2001 - but not so rapidly that school planners should have been caught out
In 2008 this figure is close to 709k – a significant turnaround, but hardly so fast as to catch anyone unawares (click chart to enlarge).
In our work, we regularly support clients in understanding their catchment area, likely demand and population changes in the child population. Indeed, for independent schools we can look further than this, identifying numbers of households within a 15 minute or 30 minute drivetime of a school, who have both school-age children and household income above a certain threshold. Similar analysis is carried out by supermarkets, housing developers, shopping and leisure centre planners and a multitude of other commercial groups.
We wonder if a deeper level of analysis within Local Authority and Government education planning departments should not be taking place.
For more details about our research, strategy and marketing services for education, please contact mtm.
Very interesting!