Buy through Amazon as an e-book, paperback or even as a hardback or contact me via comments for your signed copy of a paperback at a lower price £13 plus postage and packing. Over 100 posts all in one place
How do you deal with the issue of falling rolls in our schools? A senior politician recently told me that there was no way they would reduce the admission number for a successful school, because the parents wouldn’t stand for it.
Interestingly when Mrs Thatcher widened the concept of parental choice in section 6 of the 1980 Education Act, the civil servants left a ‘get out’ clause allowing local authorities to override their ‘duty to meet the expressed parental preference’ because it was ‘prejudicial to the efficient use of resources’. Back in those days, the notion of parental power was very much in its early days.
Now the politician I spoke with was only voicing the approach any retailer might take to falling sales; cut out the loss-making branches and strengthen those that make a profit. ‘Let the weakest go to the wall’, a dictum many learnt in school when studying their Skaespeare.
But, should public services operate in the same fashion? It’s worth remembering that parents are required to educate their children, and the State is the default provision for those that don’t, won’t or in most cases cannot do so in any other way.
How the State has responded to that demand from parents for schooling has changed over time. A reader reminded me of the Liberal Democrat position, as expressed by Nick Clegg during the coalition government that perhaps took parent power to the ultimate. I wrote then a blog post entitled Private education, but State Funded? | John Howson This might have been a good idea at the start of a decade of rising school rolls, but does it hold good when rolls are falling?
I guess it depends upon where you live. In a densely packed urban area, with many schools within easy distance of each other, survival of the fittest might seem logical even if the fittest was a Church School and didn’t have many pupils on free School Meals. However, even in urban areas, change is rarely easy, and often messy, and the current funding formula for schools doesn’t help.
Schools below capacity often run at a deficit, so should academy trusts prop these schools up with cash from other schools that don’t spend all their income? Perhaps that’s why parent power – or at least parent governors – don’t exist in most academies, in case they rumbled what was happening.
In less urban areas, the issue is more complex. Consider the following case study. Imagine a town and its locality with 5 primary schools where there is little or no house building, and post-covid relatively little movement in the housing market. The current position for one such town
is shown in the table below.
In total, the five schools had 857 pupils on roll, but with a capacity for 1141, so were operating at 75% capacity. Intake for the latest year was lower at 66% of capacity.
| TYPE | CURRENT ROLL | CAPACITY | % CAPACITY | Places offered – latest | |
| SCHOOL 1 | RC | 118 | 210 | 56 | 13/30 |
| SCHOOL 2 | CofE | 299 | 315 | 95 | 45/45 |
| SCHOOL 3 | COMMUNITY | 178 | 210 | 85 | 16/30 |
| SCHOOL 4 | ACADEMY | 130 | 196 | 66 | 15/30 |
| SCHOOL 5 | COMMUNITY | 132 | 210 | 63 | 18/28 |
Schools 1-3 are in the town, and schools 4-5 are within easy travelling distance. The obvious answer might be to close one of schools 4-5, but that would create additional transport costs for the local authority; to be paid from Council Tax.
Closing the RC school is not possible, as the exiting pupils cannot be accommodated at the other two schools, as they have insufficient spare capacity, and the need would be for an additional 70 places over the current capacity. Should the RC school numbers fall further to less than 100-110, and intakes not increase at the other two town schools, it would be possible to close the RC school if each of the other two schools in the town could take an extra class. However, the restricted nature of their sites may that possibility unlikely.
What happens if the RC school remains open, and starts to run a deficit budget and, as a consequence, either the diocese eventually decided to turn the school into an academy or it is judged inadequate by ofsted, and forced to become an academy. Could the diocese transfer funds from other schools to keep the school open?
What of the future for schools 4 & 5 if they are faced with the same scenario of starting to operate on deficit budgets, and the risk to the local authority with regard to school 5 at a time of great pressure on the authority’s budget.
Should someone create a plan for the future. If so, who? The local authority, the Regional School Director, the DfE? Or does the desire of the parents for one particular school eventually affect the other four schools, and the market decides? Discuss.
For those that want to consider the issue further, I wrote a play around a school facing falling rolls in its locality to try to tease out some of the issues. You can access it at C:\Users\dataf\OneDrive\Documents\FallingRollsPlay.docx or by requesting a copy by using the comment section
Reader might also like this post from a decade ago. My concern about the future of small schools isn’t new. Are small schools doomed? | John Howson
This is the third in my series of posts based upon my thoughts on headteacher vacancies that have been posted by state schools in England so far this school year. This post is a bit more speculative than the previous two posts, as it looks at the relationship between re-advertisements of headteacher vacancies and the percentage of children on Free School Meals as recorded on the DfE’s website in the schools that have re-advertised their headship.
I have used data for all the vacancies where free school meals data are available as the baseline. New schools; nursery schools; sixth form colleges and some other schools are excluded as they don’t have free school meals pupils. Thes other schools may be small schools, or just schools that have not recorded the percentage at this point in time.
| % RANGE of FSM pupils | ALL ADVERTS | RE-ADS | PERCENTAGE |
| 0-9.9 | 174 | 24 | 14% |
| 10-19.9 | 267 | 27 | 10% |
| 20-29.9 | 193 | 30 | 16% |
| 30-39.9 | 163 | 27 | 17% |
| 40-49.9 | 109 | 15 | 14% |
| 50-59.9 | 73 | 8 | 11% |
| 60-69.9 | 38 | 4 | 11% |
| 70+ | 16 | 6 | 38% |
I have divided the vacancies into groups in an arbitrary manner. At this stage of the year, many schools that have advertised during February and March will not yet have had time to complete the appointment process, and decide whether or not to make an appointment or to re-advertise. As a result, the data presented in the table are in no way definitive of the current recruitment round. It will not be until January 2027, when the autumn term of 2026 re-advertisements have been added that a definitive report can be produced.
However, it is interesting to see that six of the 16 schools with the highest percentages of children with Free School Meals entitlement have already re-advertised the vacancy for their headship.
What I have yet to do is to look at the national total number of schools in each band, to see whether certain bands have a higher turnover overall. However, there are so many different possible intervening variables that such an exercise will need to wait until the end of the school-year, and possibly the autumn to be worth considering.
Nevertheless, as previous posts have made clear, there are some school types that are likely to have a higher rate of re-advertisement than others, and it will be interesting to see by the end of the recruitment round whether or not there is any correlation within groupings such as, for instance, Roman Catholic Schools in the North West of England or small primary schools in coastal areas and the free school meal percentage of schools that re-advertise their headship.
Is this data of any use to policymakers, and if so, what should be the outcome. In the past, during the coalition government there were suggestions for intervention in helping challenging schools recruit new leaders. Nowadays, I assume that is left to multi-academy trusts and diocese, and those local authorities that still take an interest in schooling to intervene. The other interesting question is, do schools with high levels of free school meals pupils retain headteacher for shorter periods of time than other schools?
As today is April 1st, I thought about writing a post to celebrate All Fool’s Day. However, I didn’t have the heart to do so after reading Mark Pack’s brilliant parody of focus groups and political leaders. EXCLUSIVE: New focus group insights on political party leaders
My thought was to parody the mess the governance of schooling is in England at present by linking it to the opportunity offered by local government reorganisation. The post might have read something like this:
A leaked memo has suggested that the new councils created from local government reorganisation should have Education Committees. For those that are unaware of their history, such Committees existed for over a hundred years until Tony Blair imposed the cabinet style of government on local government, around the turn of the century, and abolished committees.
As a result, many decisions about education are currently taken by one person, the cabinet member, ratified, if necessary, by the cabinet, and then subject to scrutiny either before or after introduction. Although, as the civil service knows, cabinet government works well for the DfE, but it hasn’t always worked well at local levels, where coalition government is more commonplace. Local decisions about academies are often taken without any local scrutiny at all.
There is a pressing need to control the sprawling and out of control school scene, where two parallel school systems – academies and maintained schools – operate alongside each other with two sets of costs and a third diocesan system cuts across both. Education Committees could create single MAT for an area, including all schools, and make each school subject to democratically appointed governing bodies, voted in each year by the use of an app on mobile phones. Local employers would also have a vote, as would the Schools Council.
Schools forums would be abolished. Each Education Committee would establish a group of expert teachers to help schools and act as a buffer between schools and ofsted. In fact, ofsted would only visit schools either where Education Committees were concerned about the school or as part of a national sampling exercise liked to specific areas of national concern.
Education Committees would be part of a partnership of schooling that reflected a national service locally administered. Their understanding of place ….
At this point, the next page of the memo is lost. However, there is a note in the margin in scrawly handwriting that the current system is expensive and we should take a leaf out of the Department of Health’s recent mergers of ICBs to cut costs. We are worried that the growth of new upper tier authorities replacing the remaining ‘shire’ counties will increase costs with many new Directors each requiring need liaising from the department.
For those that don’t understand the heading, I suggest a visit to The Best April Fools’ Hoax Ever – GreekReporter.com Next year will be 70th anniversary of the programme’s first broadcast. What a different world we now inhabit.
In the summer of 2024, I was asked to lecture on the future of education. Two years on, it is interesting to see how even more relevant today the content of the talk is. Sadly, there are still no answers to many of the questions posed in my talk.
Thank you for inviting me to talk to you this evening. I arrived in Oxfordshire some 45 years ago, about the same time as the late Sir Tim Brighouse. This was only a couple of years after Prime Minister Sir Jim Callagham’s visit to Oxford, and his famous Ruskin College speech that started The Great Debate about education and schooling in England. A debate that has ultimately led us to where we are today.
Starting this talk with a look back at history reminds me that if this were a sermon, I would start with a text. Perhaps, ‘Acts Chapter 2 Verse 17’. I won’t read it out, as those that want to know what it says can look it up on their phones.
However, what I want to talk briefly about this evening is RATS -I have to say that thankfully you are spared the PowerPoint picture at this point.
However, RATS stands for:
Responsibility
Accountability
Technology
And
Schooling
RATs or ARTS is better, even if the order is wrong.
First Responsibility
Who is responsible for what in education
People still cheerfully talk of ‘Oxfordshire’s schools’ but in reality, as cabinet member, I deal with only a limited number of functions these days:
-Admissions to school, but not in-year admissions to academies
-Transport to school, but not for over 16s, as this is discretionary and there is no cash, despite raising the learning leaving age to 18, except for SEND pupils where we still support those where we can. So, a young person can receive free transport from Years 7-11 and then nothing.
-School building – we have built more new schools in the past decade than the previous 50 years. But as ever this area is highly regulated.
HR for maintained schools – this means small primary schools have to pay the Apprenticeship Levy – a tax by any other name.
School Improvement – although the £400,000 annual DfE grant ends this month and next year we are funding it from Council Tax.
-SEND – and we will spend £20 million more than the government provides us with funds in this area and end this financial year some £60 million overspent.
That overspend lead me nicely into considering Accountability
If there is confusion over responsibility, is there any clarity over accountability for our school system?
As I mentioned, Oxfordshire has overspent on SEND and by 2026 this may be as much as £140 million
Schools receive their budgets calculated on formulas where Oxfordshire as a local authority has no vote, and merely acts as the banker. Schools may end the year in surplus or in deficit
If you look at academy chains in Oxfordshire, several have schools with balances of £1 million and other have deficits nearing the same figure.
Who is accountable for these outcomes and how will they be dealt with?
If the RSD is prepared to accept academies in deficit that they add to each year, why should Oxfordshire as a local authority wipe out deficits on schools transferring to become an academy: perhaps we will explore issuing an IOU to be paid when there are no deficits in the academy sector.
Last year, council tax payer transferred £200,000 for a school becoming an academy to wipe out is deficit: that’s a lot of potholes we could have filled. At the end of this month, I expect deficits in maintained schools to top the £3 million mark: enough to mend most of our roads.
Let’s consider some other accountability issues:
Who is responsible for ensuring there are enough teachers for Oxfordshire schools? Is it schools; MATs and the dioceses; the LA or the government at Westminster?
Who is responsible for school improvement, so when ofsted comes knocking a school can be judged outstanding, as a primary school in the north of the county has been recently.
Who will deal with the digital divide?
This last question is one that that neatly brings me onto the third theme for this evening:
Technology
Since I came to Oxfordshire at the end of the 1970s there have been three waves of new technology
The microprocessor revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s that brough BBC B, turtles, and eventually the Apple/PC dominance of our interface with IT. Indeed, my MSc thesis in 1980 was the first produced on a word processer for any course at Norham Gardens.
The second technology revolution started in the early 1990s, and became part of our lives in the first decade of this century when we all embraced the internet and started exchanging emails.
This revolution had a second phase when the phones in our pockets suddenly became mini computers in their own right, and a whole new set of challenges opened up for education. This saw the surge in new social media platforms, and the current heads-down culture that pervades so much of society these days. I won’t ask how many have already googled my suggested text for this talk.
Although schools have made adaptations to accommodate these changes in technology over the past 5 decades, we still rely upon a teaching and learning strategy that has many elements that would be familiar when state education began more than 150 years ago.
In passing, I am sorry that the covid pandemic didn’t allow us to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the 1870 Education Act in a manner that I think would have been fitting.
The 2x4x8 model of learning may not be as rigid as it once was, but secondary school ‘timetablers’ are great fans of it as a strategy.
Anyway, so much for the first two waves of technological change: what of the third and developing wave, currently described by many as the AI revolution?
Does a knowledge rich curriculum meet the needs of a generation that started school last September and possibly won’t retire from employment until the last decade of this century. Those that started school 100 years ago, around the time of the birth of the BBC and radio, retired just as the internet was becoming a viable communication strategy: what will the class of 2024 experience in their lifetimes, and how will we prepare them for adult life?
This is not to decry the role of knowledge in schooling, and especially the building blocks of literacy and numeracy. Technology has almost made handwriting redundant, except as an art form. Can technology help us deal with the learning gap at Key Stage 1 between children on Free School Meals and those whose parents have a higher degree?
If so, to return to my themes of accountability and responsibility, where does the impetus for change lie? At school or Trust level; at local authority level or nationally?
We have seen initiatives such as the Oak Academy created nationally post-covid. We also saw how Oxfordshire as a local authority dealt with covid in acting as a conduit for information.
How will the system take change forward. Who has the vision.
Perhaps parents will dictate change for us as educators?
Home schooling has increased significantly: a passing phase or signs of a new order?
I saw this week suggestions that teachers will need to be paid more if they have to work a five-day week when four days becomes the norm. It is worth noting that teachers, as a group have seen no change in their holiday entitlement over the past 50 years while all other workers have benefitted from increased time off.
So let me conclude by asking whether one might one view a model where technology, and indeed any other approach to teaching and learning, is like a table top resting on the twin legs of responsibility and accountability.
Wobbly legs can mean an insecure platform for learning, and certainly for the development in an orderly manner of how technology can change the landscape of education.
I started with the term ARTS, so my final word must be about schools.
It is right that schools and their staff must be at the heart of the landscape, but the challenge that is currently keeping me awake at night is the relationship between a national funding formula created during a period of increasing school rolls, and the current situation of falling rolls faced by many primary schools.
How will hard decisions on whether all schools survive be taken, if pupil numbers continue to decline? For instance, who decides on whether we keep primary schools in local communities or face competition between schools for pupils to keep their own school open?
What part can technology play in solving this dilemma? I don’t know, but I do know the relationship between falling rolls and school funding is not one we can duck going forward.
But let me finish on a brighter note. This week, I met with three young entrepreneurs interested in working with schools on drone technology. Indeed, they have started a series of books that might be the 21st century version of Thomas the tank engine.
Let me introduce you to Ruby Rescue and the big fire – a tale from Drone City and possible future firefighting techniques.
I started my teaching career in Tottenham with the stewardship of 16 mm projectors; reel to reel tape recorders; an epidiascope, and little other technology but in a certain landscape for schooling.
I don’t want to dream of a past, but rather to challenge us all to set out a vision for the future landscape of education that can work for the good of all.
Thak you for listening.
In a post in January, I mused about the issue of how falling rolls might affect schools particularly if it meant less funding, where school funding is based upon a per pupil funding model. Fewer pupils = less cash. Accountability and falling school rolls. Was it different in the past? | John Howson
One of the possible solutions discussed in that post was a reform of post-16 education. In a cash-strapped school system, is it possible to justify schools with small sixth forms? Are such sixth forms in the best interest of the students?
In order to think more deeply about this issue, I have looked at the ‘A’ Level results from one local authority, as published on the DfE’s website. 11-16 schools are excluded, as are schools that will eventually expect to have a sixth form, but aren’t currently at that stage, and also colleges. What’s is left are the details for the outcomes on ‘A’ Level results for 34 schools, as shown in the table below
| pupils entered | best 3 score | progress score | average or above |
| 312 | 39.88 | 0.2 | AA |
| 211 | 35.75 | 0.08 | A |
| 125 | 40.77 | -0.13 | |
| 117 | 41.68 | 0.02 | A |
| 110 | 31.45 | -0.30 | |
| 107 | 33.24 | 0.00 | A |
| 96 | 34.34 | 0.00 | A |
| 94 | 38.3 | 0.17 | AA |
| 90 | 36.33 | 0.19 | AA |
| 89 | 35.51 | -0.12 | A |
| 87 | 31.53 | 0.08 | A |
| 82 | 39.15 | 0.80 | AA |
| 82 | 36.42 | 0.07 | A |
| 79 | 34.57 | -0.33 | |
| 69 | 29.47 | -0.21 | |
| 66 | 35.1 | 0.26 | AA |
| 66 | 32.37 | -0.10 | A |
| 65 | 35.64 | 0.03 | A |
| 64 | 33.39 | -0.15 | |
| 62 | 35.7 | 0.20 | AA |
| 59 | 34.69 | -0.09 | |
| 57 | 32.52 | 0.06 | A |
| 46 | 34.57 | -0.33 | |
| 42 | 33.65 | -0.11 | A |
| 41 | 31.14 | -0.46 | |
| 30 | 14.67 | -0.69 | |
| 28 | 36.31 | 0.21 | A |
| 25 | 25.07 | -0.02 | |
| 22 | 34.85 | 0.70 | A |
| 14 | 24.52 | -0.83 | A |
| 13 | 18.21 | -0.75 | |
| 9 | 24.52 | -0.83 | |
| 9 | 37.78 | 0.35 | A |
For comparison purposes, the average score for state schools in England was -0.03 for Progress and 35.76 for the best 3 ‘A’ Levels score. There are other measures that could be used, but these are three I chose to use for this blog post.
Nine out of the 34 schools beat the national average for ‘best score’, although another couple of schools narrowly missed the national average, so it might be better to conclude that 14 schools were either close to or exceeded the national average for ‘best score’, leaving 20 schools that were below the national average.
Progress score is a more contentious measure. Here 15 schools did less well than average. The same schools often feature in both lists. Most of these schools entered less than 100 pupils for three subjects at ‘A’ level. Some pupils might have taken either two subjects and a vocational qualification or just two subjects at ‘A’ Level.
Schools that entered more pupils for 3 ‘A’ Levels were more likely to receive an ‘average’ or ‘above average’ grade.
The data forces me to ask the question – is the current arrangements for ‘A’ Level study across these schools producing the best outcomes for students? Two subsidiary questions are; if this is the outcome close to the top of the demographic cycle, what might happen to sixth form sizes in these schools once rolls start to fall in a few years’ time? The second question is, what is the cost of tuition per pupil under the present arrangements.
To answer the latter question, let’s assume a Year 7 class of 30 for mathematics taught by a newly qualified teacher on the bottom of the Main Scale for five period a week for 40 week, and an ‘A’ Level group taught for 5 periods a week by the Head of Department, on the top of the Upper Pay spine, and with a TLR 2A in addition.
The newly qualified teacher teaches 6 classes per week for 40 weeks, while the Head of Department teaches two ‘A’ Level sets, one of which has 10 weeks examination leave in Year 13. In addition, the Head of Department teaches four classes of 30, one of which has exam leave in Year 11.
Using this data, and ignoring any other time spent on non-teaching duties, the Main Scale Teacher costs work out at 0.91p per pupil, while the Head of Department costs are £2.33p per pupil.
If the ’A’ Level groups were smaller than 15 in each year, as they well might be in some schools, then the cost per pupil increases unless the Head of Department receives a lesser amount in TLR.
In an 11-16 school, where the Head of Department might teach five classes for 40 weeks and one for 30 to allow for examination leave, the cost per pupil for the Head of Department reduces to below £2 per pupil. If the school has only long-serving teachers then the per pupil for teachers increases to nearer £1.50 per pupil.
For small schools with settled staffrooms, the difference in cost between the cost of teaching Years 7-11 and Years 11-13 may be marginal. The issue then becomes one of teaching and learning. Do small sixth forms produce as good examination results as larger sixth forms? The evidence from the table would suggest they are less likely to do so.
What of the student experience? Is it better to be either ‘a big fish in a small pool’ or ‘a small fish in a larger pool’? Has anyone ever asked students their views?
I think that there is a debate to be had about school organisation and size of school sixth forms when rolls fall, especially if school funding comes under pressure from increased government spending on both defence and welfare, and especially if we are in a recession.
As my colleagues in Haringey found out in the 1970s, such debates about changes to sixth forms can be fraught with political pitfalls for anyone suggesting change. But, is that a good enough reason not to at least discuss changes?
Note: I have only used salary costs in the modelling and not included on-costs from National Insurance and Pensions. I have also ignored premises and other staffing costs, as I assumed the to be low in a subject such as mathematics.
Despite the increase in applicants for secondary ITT courses, from 21,436 in March 2025, to 27,352 this March, ‘offers’ from course providers are down in nine different subjects this March when compared with March 2025. The subjects with fewer offer so far this year are:
| Subject | Offer March 2026 | Offer March 2025 | % change |
| Art & Design | 366 | 451 | 19% |
| Biology | 332 | 713 | 53% |
| Classics | 27 | 34 | 21% |
| English | 990 | 1032 | 4% |
| Geography | 292 | 476 | 39% |
| Modern Foreign Languages | 733 | 821 | 11% |
| Music | 136 | 173 | 21% |
| Physical Education | 1043 | 1149 | 9% |
| Religious Education | 208 | 255 | 18% |
I think one can discount both Physical Education and English from subjects where the declines are of concern. Elsewhere, the changes in bursary support are obviously having an effect. Those biologists that can do so are now applying for Chemistry – where there is still a bursary, and offers are up from 441 last march to 675 this March – but the overall offer across the two subjects are still below last March at 997, compared with 1,154 last March.
It is the arts subjects that seem to have been most badly hit. This is not surprising given the changes to the bursary scheme that saw the bursary axed completely for music and religious education, and reduced for biology from £26,000 to just £5,000, while it increased to £29,000 for chemistry. French and Spanish also lost their £26,000 bursaries. The reduction in ’offers’ in geography, down by 39% may also be due to the cut in the bursary from £26,000 to just £5,000.
Given the need for fewer teachers in the future, as secondary school rolls start to fall, these changes to bursaries do look like a gamble. How much of a gamble will be clear when the DfE finally announces the ITT training targets. But my hunch is that music and religious education along with geography will join the list of subjects not hitting their targets unless the current global war affects graduate recruitment in the summer. Will there be a late surge of new graduates looking to teaching, similar to that during the early months of the pandemic in 2020? The jury is out for the moment, but such a surge would not surprise me. However, as a precaution, reinstating a scholarship in the arts subjects might be a wise precaution. This might make it look less like a -U- turn than a reinstatement of the bursary.
Elsewhere in the data, candidates form the ‘Rest of the World’ accounted for 30% of all candidates this March, compared with 21% last March. The DfE really does need to show how this increase affects different subjects and how many of these candidates will be likely to receive a visa to both learn and then teach in England? Can we afford to waste funds on those with no prospect of teaching in England, while depriving potential home candidates of bursaries.
As expected at this time of year, there has been more interest from career changers than university students, with those under 24 showing an increase over last year of just 1,000 compared with an increase of more than 4,900 from those in the 25-39 age groupings.
A great deal of research can be boring to do. That’s certainly true of my research into the labour market for teachers that I first started way back in the early1980s. Currently, I am tracking advertisements for headteacher vacancies in England.
The DfE is running a series of adverts on platforms such as LinkedIn extolling the virtue of advertising on their free vacancy site and claiming almost complete coverage of vacancies.
It is certainly true that the DfE site contains the majority of the headteacher vacancies in state schools in England, but I am not sure whether it has as complete a coverage as it maintains. One wonders what the Advertising Regulatory Body would make of such an unsubstantiated claim? It certainly would be allowed for beauty products.
The DfE site also has a number of idiosyncrasies. For headteacher vacancies, the most significant is the repetition of certain vacancies, a factor that inflates the total number of vacancies. For instance, today, the DfE site suggests that there are 185 vacancies listed (1130 on 22.3.26). In reality there are only 160 schools advertising for a headteachers on the site. The other listings are repeats, or in one case a double repeat, with the vacancy appearing three times in all.
Does this repetition matter? It does if anyone is just counting the total of vacancies listed, as that would inflate the turnover of headteachers. Such simple counting would also need to also take into account the length of times each vacancy is listed. This can range from four weeks to a couple of days. Why some vacancies only appear for a short length of time is an interesting question. Do these schools have a candidate in mind, and hence don’t want other applicants?
Then there is the issue of genuine re-advertisements, where a school advertised, but failed to make an appointment. If counting the number of schools seeking a headteacher, then these re-advertisements need to be discarded. To do so, needs a regular analysis of the whole list of vacancies, as there is no easier way to identify such schools. There is also an irritating practice from some MATs of not identifying the school where the vacancy has occurred. Some MATs also avoid information about the starting salary: I think that this is a mistake, since their idea of generous, may not be the same to MATs as to candidates, and it is embarrassing to find this out at interview stage.
What of the schools whose headteacher vacancies appear more than once in the same list? Many are newly advertised vacancies; some are re-advertisements, but in each of these groups there seem little logic to the schools listed. At present, there are no schools in either the West Midlands or London regions with double entries. However, of the 25 schools with double entries, six each are in the South East and East of England.
At the end of the school-year it will be interesting to see whether some MATs, local authorities or dioceses fare worse when it comes to making an appointment of a headteacher. There are some obvious candidates already appearing after just six months of the school-year.
Yesterday, I wrote about the forecast decline in primary and secondary school places. In the past, less attention has been paid to the need for places for pupils with SEND. However, possibly as a result of the rapid growth in EHCPs, and hence the demand for specialist provision, the DfE has started trying to forecast what it has termed ‘the Local authority pupil forecasts for ‘Local authority specialist provision for pupils’.
This exercise was always going to be something of a challenge since it is taking place against falling pupil numbers, especially in the primary sector, but increasing demand for EHCPs. However, if demand for EHCPs continues to increase, it won’t necessarily mean a demand for more special school places, because some of the increased demand is likely to be met by specialist provision within schools as ‘specialist bases’ are created, often using the spare capacity arising from falling rolls.
At present the DfE data shows that the current stock of special schools is operating at over-capacity by some 10,000 places. At the top of a demographic cycle, such pressure would not be surprising, as schools often take ‘bulge’ classes for a couple of years using temporary buildings rather than built new schools that might not be needed as rolls fall. Whether that is the correct approach in the present circumstances for the special school sector is unclear from the DfE’s data published yesterday. School capacity in England: academic year 2024 to 2025 – GOV.UK
An analysis of local authority data around provision of specialist provision for the period up to the end of the decade reveals large differences across the country in projected need. At one end of the spectrum, three local authorities are projecting grow of in excess of 1,200 places each in the primary sector. At the other end of the spectrum, twenty-four authorities are predicting a reduction in need, with one ‘Reform’ led county predicating a need for 500 fewer places. Interestingly, the adjacent unitary authority is predicting an increase of over 100 places.
Oxfordshire, whose primary and secondary place forecasts were discussed in my previous post is predicting only a very small increase in the number of primary places.
These significant differences don’t seem to be related to either the underlying pupil population or the trend in pupil numbers in the primary sector. This raises issues about how reliable the current forecasting around the demand for SEND places is for policy-makers. Accurate data are important, because of the cost of provision in the SEND sector.
Data on provision of places are also important in helping identify workforce needs. It seems odd that the DfE doesn’t seem to have a unit that brings together trends in pupil numbers and the demand for both places and people to educate the projected school population.
If the DfE did have such a unit then it might look at the costs of small sixth forms and of central overheads by different MATs. It might also look at the issue of small primary schools, and how they might be protected in rural areas, but possibly amalgamated in urban areas. Is a one-from of entry school viable in London?
Hopefully, the data published yesterday will create some debate around the important, but often overlooked, issue of pupil place planning, and the future shape of schooling in the modern age.
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.
John Howson 