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