School building boom is over

Posted on March 19, 2026 by John Howson

The DfE has published its latest estimates of school capacity for 2024/25, together with estimates for places needed up to 2029/30 School capacity in England: academic year 2024 to 2025 – GOV.UK

There are two sets of numbers. One looks at both need and places available and calculates what might be regarded as a raw score. This looks at all spare places, regardless of location within the authority and measures that number against expected additional need. The second set just looks at additional need.

During the period between 2025/26 and 2029/30, most additional need is likely to come from changes in the housing stock, with little, if any, growth from the increase in the number of pupils in the relevant age groups. As a result, most local authorities show either no need for additional primary places or only small increases in numbers. Wandsworth is the only Inner London borough with any additional need for primary school places during the period 2025/26 and 2029/30.

The table balancing existing places with additional need shows only a handful of local authorities with a reduction in the spare capacity in the primary sector between 2025/26 and 2029/30. For most authorities, the spare place problem is expected to be worse in 2029/30 than it is in 2025/26

	net spare places
Oxfordshire	Primary	Secondary
2025/26	-11,052	-6,321
2026/27	-11,557	-6,449
2027/28	-13,117	-6,959
2028/29	-13,865	-7,143
2029/30	-14,601	-7,336

Change	-3,549	-1,015

The table shows the estimates for Oxfordshire. Several factors could mean these data are not going to be accurate. In recent years, Oxfordshire has seen significant housebuilding, and if the construction of new housing continues, and attracts families from outside the county, then the spare places may be an overestimate.

Oxfordshire is also home to several military bases for both the army and the RAF. Although defence planning has projected the closure of some of the army bases, the current defence review and increased spending on defence might either slowdown or reverse the closure of some of the bases. If closures slow down, then this might mean pupil numbers don’t fall as expected.

The problem for both the local authority, the dioceses and the academy trusts is that Oxfordshire has many small primary schools located in villages. Often the school is the only facility left in the community. The present funding formula that is heavily biased towards pupil numbers poses a potential problem for small schools. Academy trusts can ‘vire’ funds between schools to help such schools through any temporary downturn in pupil numbers. At present local authorities do not have this ability: they should be given the power to support small village schools in the same way as MATs can.

However, as with many other rural areas, school closures look likely over the next few years if schools are not to run up deficit budgets. Such deficits would be paid off by depriving future pupils of some of their funding. With education spending likely to be squeezed to accommodate the increase in defence spending, and a greater proportion of the school funding going toward SEND pupils, there may well be some hard decisions to make.

With declining interest in established faiths, how will the dioceses react to falling rolls, if their schools are no longer viable?

One certainty is that if any school closures require additional free transport to the next nearest school, the current£20 million Oxfordshire council tax payers contribute to fund mainstream school transport will not be enough, even if fuel and other costs remain stable.

Local government reorganisation may offer a way out for politicians in areas such as Oxfordshire, but politicians in urban areas, and especially in London will not be so lucky. Time to dust off my review of falling rolls in Haringey in the 1970,s and the lessons to be learnt from those battles.

Headteacher: recruitment bonus – good value or not?

Posted on February 22, 2026 by John Howson

Following suggestions that the DfE might pay a £15,000 recruitment bonus/golden hello to encourage people to take the role of headteacher in a challenging school, I though I would look at the most recent data regarding schools failing to appoint a new headteacher at their first attempt.

The data covers 789 schools that have advertised for a headteacher between 1^st August 2025 and the 20^th February 2026 on their the DfE vacancy platform or since 1^st January 2026, the tes jobsite as well.

Of course, some schools still have active vacancies that have yet to reach their closing date, so the data are probably an underestimate. The 789 is lower than might be expected number of vacancies from looking at historical data. Is it possible that some MATs no longer advertise headteacher vacancies nationally?

Anyway, there have been 80 schools that have so far readvertised their headteacher vacancy. Of these schools,

50 were primary schools

14 were secondary schools

16 were special schools

13 were Roman Catholic Schools

17 Church of England

2 other faiths

48 Not faith school

Regionally, the picture is as shown in the table.

REGION	READVERT	ADVERT	% READ
SE	5	89	6%
SW	6	91	7%
WM	8	101	8%
YH	10	108	9%
NW	12	107	11%
EM	10	81	12%
L	12	92	13%
EE	13	97	13%
NE	4	22	18%
ENGLAND	80	789	10%

The North East data shows how percentages can be misleading as two of the four schools are special schools. Without those two schools, the percentage drops to a below average 9%.

A bonus of £15,000 might look attractive to someone thinking of a headteacher post in a primary school, but with many secondary headteacher vacancies being advertised with a starting salary in six figures, would £15,000 be enough to attract candidates to apply for the vacancy? How does it compare with subject bonuses for working in such schools?

A review of the 14 secondary schools for percentage pass at Grade 5 in English and mathematics from the DfE website, shows a range of outcomes

22.8
27.0
32.9
33.5
38.5
39.5
40.2
43.7
49.8
51.3
51.5
62.3
64.6
83.5

However, it would suggest that re-advertising secondary schools do appear to have below average outcomes. However, four of the schools posted their vacancy just before Christmas, and that might be more of reason for the re-advertisement than their GCSE score, that is unless the school has to re-advertise for a second time after an early 2026 re-advert.

Special schools do seem to have difficulty attracting a head teacher, so a bonus there could potentially be useful as an inducement, especially as taking such a headship often involves a house move.

Overall, if the scheme just covered secondary and special schools, it might cost the DfE around £1 million a year. Add in primary schools, and the cost could be much higher.

However, it does seem clear that a school’s results may not be the only barrier to a school recruiting a headteacher easily.

There needs to be certainty that there are sufficient candidates will, able and experienced enough to move into headship. There the DfE certainly has a role to play.

White Paper: bad news for rural primary schools

Posted on February 22, 2026 by John Howson

Tomorrow, Monday, we will see Labour’s White Paper in full. For now, we have copious leaks and SEND and other matters, such as how to tackle the outcome gaps between the most deprived pupils and their more fortunate fellows either sitting alongside them or in other schools to whet our appetite.

The replacement of Free School Meals as a measure of deprivation has been long overdue, but it will be interesting see, as schooling moves from a local service to a national service, administered in a similar fashion to the NHS, whether the civil service will be any better than local politicians at managing the performance of the school system.

Making all schools academies will be the final nail in local government’s interest in schooling. Once SEND is handled nationally, it will just leave admissions, mainly on-line these days, to be removed from local management.

However, the changes already foreshadowed in the leaks mean that there will be winners and losers. Assuming that H M Treasury might fund some of the SEND changes, there is unlikely to be any new money to support schools to improve.

The present Funding Formula is heavily biased towards pupil numbers. Great when rolls are rising, but bad news for small schools when rolls fall. If the formula is altered to move more money towards schools with significant numbers of pupils not achieving expected standards, where will the cash come from?

Might small rural primary schools with good attendance and excellent results see their funding cut in real terms? If so, what are the consequences likely to be? Trusts will be reluctant to keep schools that cost more to run than they bring in through funding open, and will have no incentive to do so. Afterall, any travel costs will be paid for from the local authority under present arrangements.

I can see the local government organisations saying that if local authorities don’t run schools, then they shouldn’t have to pay any transport costs. Taking £46 million off Oxfordshire County Council’s budget would pay for an awful lot of pothole repairs, not to mention bolstering other services.

For those local authorities currently receiving little funding from central government, removing schooling entirely from local government would be an unexpected bonus. On the other hand, there would, as with the NHS, be no local democratic accountability. Education rarely features during general elections.

One bonus of a national school system is that the government might feel able to create a universal system for secondary schools, some 61 years after Circular 10/65 and on the 50^th Anniversary of the 1976 Education Act.

Without democratic oversigh,t ignoring the 2006 rules about closing small rural primary schools will be much easier. Small one form entry faith schools in urban areas with good results have even less protection. It is worth studying the results for primary schools in Haringey to see the parts of the borough that might be winners and those that might be losers if funding doesn’t increase overall.

As someone that started teaching in Tottenham in 1971, when we had ‘areas of exceptional difficulty’ payments introduced into ‘Education Priority Areas’ it is interesting to see how stark the divide between schools on opposite sides of the railway line north from Kings Cross still remains.

So, will the government close that divide? But will it be at a cost to rural primary schools in Oxfordshire, my current home?

Headteacher vacancies: even in August

Posted on August 9, 2025 by John Howson

More than 40 years ago, I first started counting heads. That’s actually headteacher vacancies, not actual heads. With some spare time on my hands, I thought that I would go back to my roots and look at what is the current state of play this August?

Of course, August is a quiet month, and there are currently fewer than 60 headteacher vacancies listed on the DfE website that is the main go-to place these days, just as the TES was in the 1980s.

The DfE vacancy website still contains some of the flaws created when it was established. Anyone trying to use modern methods of’ scraping’ jobs will come across the random duplication outcome that has been a feature of the site ever since its inception. I am not sure whether it was deliberate or a fault in the coding, but it always used to annoy me when I was running TeachVac to see the same job repeated in the listing more than once.

The alternative, pioneered by TeachVac was to ‘scrape’ school websites where schools placed their jobs. However, for obvious reasons, not all schools placed headship vacancies on their website. Presumably not to let staff and parents know of the impending departure of their headteacher.

At least with headteacher posts, there is no problem deciding whether the vacancy is a repeat listing or a re-advertisement. Headteacher posts are unique, and thus easy to track.

Anyway, what did I learn from collecting the first 50 vacancies? Special schools were over-represented, with eight such schools looking for a headteacher this August. As a part of the White Paper on SEND, I hope that the government will consider the staffing and training of staff for the special school sector that has long been a Cinderella, and if not bullied by the bigger primary and secondary sectors, it is certainly still in search of a fairy godmother.

There are only two secondary schools in the list, and one is a 10-14 school, and the other a private school. That doesn’t surprise me, as secondary schools usually sort out headship vacancies well before the start of the school year. If there is an unexpected vacancy, then there is often a deputy head that can ‘act up’ until an appropriate time to advertise the vacancy.

Of the 50 or so primary schools, including one First School, 17 were faith schools: ten Roman Catholic; six Church of England and one other Christian faith. These numbers don’t surprise me in the least; indeed, I would have been surprised if there were fewer Roman Catholic schools in the list. All the years I monitored headteacher vacancies, Roman Catholic schools often featured prominently in any listings.

The relative absence of schools from London and much of the South East is interesting, but I need more data to say anything else than that.

Almost all schools provide a starting salary, either as a point on the scale or as a cash sum. One academy adds 5% to the quoted salary. The indication of a starting salary is an improvement over the time when schools rarely quoted a starting salary for those interested in becoming their headteacher.

Whether I keep us this task will no doubt depend upon how much else I have to do, but it was interesting retracing my footsteps.

TeachVac special offer

Posted on December 11, 2022 by John Howson

TeachVac are now offering a FREE subscription, up until February 2023, if you register a school with TeachVac now! From February, TeachVac will invoice a yearly subscription of £1 per match with a ceiling of £500 for secondary schools and £75 for primary schools.

Sign up at http://www.teachvac.co.uk

TeachVac has made 2,000,000 + MATCHES MADE in 2022

TeachVac has listed 100,000 + TEACHING JOBS in 2022

2023 vacancies will only be listed for schools signed up to TeachVac.

The average secondary school received more than 500 matches in 2022.

2023 will be another difficult year for teacher recruitment, so can you afford to miss this offer?

Headship: does school type matter when recruiting?

Posted on August 7, 2022 by John Howson

How much does the type of school matter when trying to recruit a new headteacher? More many years than I can count, indeed almost since I started researching the labour market for school leaders in England, way back in the1980s, it has seemed that data has always pointed to certain schools finding recruitment a challenge.

So, with a bit of spare time, I thought I would look at the experiences in one large shire county (not Oxfordshire) in the period between January 2021 and the end of July 2022.

Vacancies for headteachers in state-funded primary schools – one shire county Jan 21-July22

ADVERTS	INFANT	JUNIOR	PRIMARY – M	PRIMARY – CE	PRIMARY – RC
1	10	8	8	9	1
2	6	5	7	9	0
3	2	0	0	1	0
4	3	1	0	0	0
5	0	2	0	2	0
6+	0	0	0	2	0
TOTAL	21	16	15	23	1
2+	11	7	7	14	0
% 2+	52%	44%	47%	61%	0%

Source TeachVac

Interestingly, although Infant schools appear to fare better than other schools in terms of recruiting after a single advertisement, three of the ten schools in the table placed their first advertisement during either June or July of 2022. Discounting those schools produces a 2+ percentage for infant schools of 61% and not 52%. This is the same as for Church of England Primary Schools.

However, although most infant and junior schools in this locality are Maintained schools, there are some Church of England Infant and junior schools, and they seem more likely than the maintained schools to have to re-advertise.

Indeed, Church of England schools account for all of the primary schools with more than two rounds of advertisements for a headteacher. These include one school with the original vacancy plus six rounds of re-advertisements and another school with the original advertisement plus nine further rounds of advertisements between May 2021 and June 2022.

In any normal year, about half of headteacher vacancies appear between January and March. Vacancies advertised later in the year tend to be harder to fill unless there is local interest in taking on the school. Unless a primary school has access to subscription advertising for its vacancies, this can become an expensive business, especially for a small primary school. MATs may be able to cover these costs, but with local authorities not able to top-slice school budgets in the same way, this can be an expensive problem for governing bodies, especially if headteachers only stay in post for a few years in such schools.

There is much less of an issue in filling vacancies for headteachers of secondary and all-through schools, although some of the same caveats about timing remain. Also, for the secondary sector, the type of school and its Free School Meals ranking outside of recessionary times may affect the degree of interest. These issues are discussed further in TeachVac’s annual review of the leadership labour market in England.

So, a community primary school advertising in January each year should have little difficulty finding a new headteacher. The governing body of a Church of England school whose headteacher needs replacing in June will probably find themselves facing a challenge in their search for a replacement.

A text for Holy Week

Posted on April 12, 2022 by John Howson

Matthew Chapter 25 verses 31-46

This blog doesn’t make a habit of straying into the realm of theology, but a recent comment about the availability of school places for children taken into care together with the post on this blog about the recent research report published by the DfE on vulnerable children and admissions did set me thinking about school admissions policies.

There is a post from a couple of years ago on this blog entitled Jacob’s Law that discussed some aspects of the issue, but not the question as to how faith schools can behave. The wider issues on admissions are discussed in What is the role of a school in its community? | John Howson (wordpress.com).

I have now discovered that some faith schools do not put all children in care in the top priority group for admission. Instead, they prioritise practicing members of their faith community. Some faith schools go some way to helping admit children in care, but only if the child in question or their carers can be considered ‘of the faith’ using a similar test to other children.

As these are state schools, using taxpayers’ money, I wonder whether it is appropriate for some children in care not to be provided with a top priority position in the admissions criteria? After all, many of these children will have been moved from their family home to live with relatives or foster families and forced to seek a new school through no actions of their own.

However, perhaps the greater argument in asking the Christian churches and other faith schools to reflect upon their admissions policy, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, where the downgrading of children in care seems to be most prevalent in admission criteria, to consider placing all children in care at the top of the list of criteria for admission is the sentiments expressed in Matthew Chapter 25 verses 31-46.

Now I know that the passage does not explicitly mention schooling or education. Indeed, learning, per se doesn’t feature a great deal in the gospels, as opposed to children that do receive mentions, presumably as like health services, they weren’t of much concern about schooling in Roman controlled provinces at that time. However, the sentiment of public service expressed in Matthew’s Gospel must surely be thought to include schooling. After all, it is in line with a gospel of love for one another?

More than a century ago, around the time the 1902 Education Act was being discussed, the Wesleyan Church debated whether their teachers were teachers of Methodists or teachers of children, and decided their purpose was to teach children, not just to teach Methodist children. Hence, there are no state-funded Methodist secondary schools, although there remain a few primary schools around the country under the auspices of the Methodist Church.

I would hope, at least in terms of children taken into care, whose vulnerability and need for support is obvious, that the leaders of faiths whose schools don’t put such children at the top of their admissions policy would reconsider that decision this Easter. Please put children in care as top priority for admissions in every state-funded school in England.

Reverter Clauses and school sites

Posted on April 28, 2021 by John Howson

The Supreme Court only features rarely in posts on this blog. There was the case of the parent from the Isle of Wight that decided the issue of holidays taken in school terms, and the case relating to when criminal offences should be spent that affected both volunteers and employees wanting to work in educational settings.

This month, the Supreme Court has decided a case about the use of the proceeds of a school site at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. The original site for the school was given to the local authority, not in the Nineteenth Century, when so many sites were, but in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the local Elementary School needed to expand and required more land for new buildings.

Eventually, that site needed to be replaced as well, and the County Council purchased an adjacent site and built new school buildings. The school moved into the new buildings leaving the former site vacant. The County sold the vacant former school site to developers. The successors of the original grantor of the land for use as a school then claimed the proceeds of the sale under the reverter clause, as the land was no longer being used for a school.

The Supreme Court had to decide who benefited from the proceeds of the sale; the County Council or those entitled if the reverter clause came into effect? Lower courts had decided first one way and then the other. You can read the judgement of the Supreme Court at https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0062-judgment.pdf

The court’s conclusion was that:

51. We conclude that, having regard to the purposes of the 1841 Act, Richard Spearman QC, at first instance, was correct to hold that, when section 14 is invoked, it is not necessary for the site to be sold before the school is moved to another site and closed on the site given by the grantor. Accordingly, we would allow this appeal.

In essence, this turned on a decision of how to interpret legislation, albeit in this case a piece of legislation 180 years old. As a young undergraduate in the 1960s at LSE, I took a first year course in constitutional law and I still recall the lecture on the rules of interpretation: in those days, as I recall, it was one of; the Literal Rule, The Golden Rule or the Mischief Rule.

In this case, the Supreme Court seems to have said that a piece of legislation must be read ‘in the round’ and that by doing so it places less weight on the Literal Rule. Applying Clause 2 of the legislation without Clause 14 being taken into account would have returned the land to the heirs of the grantor, but Clause 14 anticipated that there might be a need for a school to be rebuilt on a different site and created situations where to do so did not lead to a reversion of the land to the grantor or their heirs.

This legislation is of especial interest to the Church of England as many of their schools were built on land granted under transfers, with a reverter clause attached if the site was not used for specific purposes, such as education. If the current downturn in the birth rate and a National Funding formula that makes small rural primary schools no longer viable over the next few years, then there might be more cases coming to court to settle who receives the proceeds of the land on which a school once operated.

Not the party we expected

Posted on October 6, 2020 by John Howson

Follow this link to an article I have written for the Church Times on schools and the pandemic. It was written in early September.

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/25-september/features/features/education-150-years-of-state-schools-not-the-party-we-expected

The State cannot just abandon children

Posted on March 19, 2020 by John Howson

Less than three weeks ago I wrote a post about ‘closing schools’. I concluded by saying that:

‘We are better equipped to deal with unforeseen events these days, whether fire, floods or pestilence; but only if we plan for them.’

Last night, I was talking live on a local radio station when the news about school closures was being announced. I was immediately struck by the very lack of planning I had suggested was needed. Obviously, no announcement was made about the consequences for the examination system and the knock-on effects about entry to higher education this autumn. True, that doesn’t need to be solved immediately, but it is a major worry for a group of young people and their parents.

Of more concern, not least in rural areas and other locations with small schools, was the statement about children falling into two groups: those of key workers and those regarded as ‘vulnerable’.

With budgets devolved to schools, decisions the education of children in these groups may have to be made at the level of the school site. Firstly, there needs to be agreement of those actually falling into each category. Secondly, for small schools, what happens if all the staff are either off sick or self-isolating: who takes responsibility? Clearly, MATs can handle decisions across their family of schools, if the finding agreement allows. But what of other schools?

My initial reaction, live on local radio, was to call for a strategic group in the local area formed from the Anglican and Roman Catholic diocese and arch-diocese, the largest Multi-Academy Trusts in the area and the local authority.

The local authority can coordinate transport and special needs and work with the other groups on ensuring a skeleton of schools are able to open, even if staff are asked to move schools. There is no point in every small rural primary school staying open for just one or two children, unless it can also in those circumstances take other children as well.

This is where the lack of planning ahead in a society dedicated to individual freedom and choice has created a set of questions we are ill-equipped as a society to answer. Is it right for government just to dump the problem on its citizens, or should it take a more interventionist approach: especially to ‘so called public services’? It is interesting that in transport the approach to services in London by the Mayor seems much more coordinated.

Perhaps this crisis will finally bring home to policy-makers the need for a coherent middle tier in education, able to do more than arrange school transport and adjudicate on school offers.

Faced with the prospect of schools being closed until September, and the possible default of some schools in the private sector as they lose their summer term fee income, there needs to be some coherent planning, both for the closure and an orderly return to a fully functioning sector. You only have to search back through this blog to know how I feel we might move forward.

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

Tag Archives: Church of England