Parents across England face a severe shortage of secondary school places for their children within the next five years, according to council leaders who saymore than 100,000 children could be affected.
The plea by the Local Government Association to avoid an emergency by 2023 came as the government released figures showing that more than a quarter of maintained secondary schools in England were in deficit last year.
The LGA said its members were unable to supply more places because the majority of secondary schools are now academies and outside their control, while government restrictions make it very hard for councils to build new schools where needed.
“No family should face uncertainty over securing their child’s secondary school,” said Anntoinette Bramble, the chair of the LGA’s children and young people board. “But the reality is we face an emergency in secondary school places where the number of pupils is growing at a far faster rate than the number of places available.”
According to the LGA’s forecasts – based on the Department for Education’s projections and the number of school places last year – by 2023-24 more than half the local authorities in England will be unable to meet demand for places with an expected shortfall of 134,000.
In recent years, councils have created an estimated 600,000 places in primary schools, to cope with the mini baby boom of the previous decade.
But as that boom cohort now nears secondary school age, councils have less ability to expand, with two-thirds of secondaries now independently governed academies.
“As a starting point, councils should be allowed to open new maintained schools and direct academies to expand,” Bramble said. “It makes no sense for councils to be given the responsibility to plan for school places but then not allowed to open schools themselves.”
There are signs that some areas are already under pressure to provide more places. In Bristol, which has seen rapid growth in recent years, only 72% of families received their first preference of school place for children starting secondary school next month, while in Brighton and Hove 5% of families did not receive any of their preferences.
The Department for Education said it was spending £23bn by 2021 to ensure every child has access to a good school place, creating a million new school places in the decade since 2010. It pointed to admissions data showing that 93.8% of children received an offer from one of their top three choices of secondary school last year.
But Angela Rayner, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said it was “unacceptable” that large numbers of families could face the anxiety of not securing a secondary school place.
“This is due to ministers pursing their own vanity projects, such as their pointless grammar school expansion, rather than following the evidence on what’s best for pupils,” Rayner said.
The squeeze comes as schools continue to tighten their belts, with funding in many cases frozen but declining in real terms because of pay, pension and inflationary pressures.
Nick Gibb, the schools minister, revealed that 26% of maintained secondary schools recorded budget deficits in 2016-17. In total nearly one in 10 maintained schools was in the red, including primaries, a figure that has almost doubled since 2014.
The Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, who received the budget figures in a written parliamentary answer, said: “With a population bubble coming through secondaries, the minister really needs to stop dressing up the numbers and get a grip. Young people get one shot at education; it’s time our government started properly investing in them.”
In his answer, Gibb said schools were trusted to manage their own budgets and the “vast majority of schools were operating with a cumulative surplus”.
The DfE said that, taking into account the 6% of academy trusts with budget deficits, fewer schools overall were in deficit than in 2010.
Meanwhile, Damian Hinds, the education secretary, released the department’s latest plan to help schools survive, including sending financial advisers to help business managers cut costs and a “toolkit of procurement ideas and deals”.
“It’s absolutely right that we help schools to maximise the money they have to spend in the classroom by working together, making sure they’re getting the best deals and are not being overcharged for services,” Hinds said.
But the National Education Union said schools needed £2bn to restore funding to where it was just two years ago.
“It is high time Damian Hinds accepted this is a real problem and stopped tinkering around at the edges, with suggestions that have either already been implemented in schools or go nowhere near addressing the shortfall of cash needed,” the NEU’s Nansi Ellis said.
