Let councils get back to the business of building schools

A shortage in secondary school places is imminent, the government should prevent a national crisis by letting local authorities manage the educational needs of their areas

The political and scientific experiment involving Britain’s kids is up and running. They’re back at school in the midst of a pandemic. For how long remains to be seen. At least this means homeschooling is over. Or is it?

Over the next few years, a marked shortage in secondary school places is forecast to emerge. As a result, thousands of unhappy parents may once again find out just what a challenging job teaching children is.

Figures from the Local Government Association (LGA) show that 11 council areas won’t have enough places to meet the expected demand when it comes to the 2021-22 intake. A projected 3,291 pupils look set to be left high and dry.

That number is set to escalate at a frankly alarming rate.

It rises to 16,987 within a year, and then to 44,190 the year after that. By 2024-25 it will hit 63,741, and then 77,085, the population of a large town or a small city, at which time one in every three local areas will be affected.

Of course, councils have a statutory requirement to find children a place. But those numbers make it very clear that the process of doing that is going to be neither quick nor easy. Large numbers of families are going to have to fall back on their pandemic experience by cooking up curricula for their kids to follow at home on the fly, at least temporarily.

Even when a place turns up, you have to question whether they’ll want to take it. They may very well be left with a Hobson’s choice between carrying on with homeschooling or sending their child to a failing school two hours and three bus journeys away.

The percentage of families who don’t get their first, second, even fifth choices is also inevitably going to rise, which means that the statutory appeals process is going to start moving at the speed of a sloth with a broken leg.

Remind me, how do you spell “political crisis”?

But wait, what’s this? The LGA, which produced the figures, says there is a way to solve this problem before it turns into one.

If, it says, the government would just let our members build schools again, so they can marry supply with demand, then the issue goes away and parents can get back to complaining about getting stuck with their second-choice school.

Hang on a minute, I hear you say, there’s something wrong here. Councils are under a statutory duty to find my child a place but they’re not allowed to create one for her?

That is indeed the case. It’s so bonkers, so monumentally, incredibly stupid and crass, that it could really only happen here.

The problem was created by, drum roll please, Michael Gove, a man whose political legacy is one of the most toxic these islands have seen since… since… nope. Struggling with that one. Perhaps there’s someone out there with a political science degree who can point to a bigger political jackass, excluding Nigel Lawson, whose policies helped create a godawful recession that led to our last brush with mass unemployment, and those who’ve got us involved in wars. Best of luck with that.

As a result of Gove’s ideological obsessions, it is only academies that are allowed to build new schools. And their interests aren’t always aligned with those of the local areas in which they operate.

There are, out there, some very good academy chains that work with local authorities and are willing to find ways to increase places where they are desperately needed. Because some will do that, what the LGA freely admits is a worst-case scenario may not be realised.

But, equally, there are some that are run by the sort of people who manage to make even Michael Gove look good, the sort of people whose primary interest appears to be the enrichment of those at the top of the greasy pole.

A couple of years ago, The Independent reported that we taxpayers not only pay for one head’s £180,000 salary but also for the insurance on his Jag. We’ve shelled out for Marco Pierre White meals, broadband at holiday homes, luxury flats, sex toys and various expenses that even MPs circa 2008 might have baulked at claiming before the parliamentary expenses scandal broke.

How are local councils expected to secure the cooperation of the sort of people who carry on like this? Bags of used banknotes?

Letting local councils, which have a much better handle on the needs of their local areas than either central government or academy chains, get back into the business of building educational institutions once more needn’t prevent academies and/or free school types doing what they do. But it might prevent a full-blown crisis engulfing the nation’s children and their voting parents.

The alternative is to ignore it until it arrives and then engage in the shabby practice of blame-shifting. While I’d rather it were otherwise, I’m afraid my money’s on the latter.