Cold spots in school provision

12th May 2023 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 12th May 2023: See also this coverage from Schools Week.

If you live in an urban area then you may be surprised to learn of the sheer number of schools nearby. Here at SchoolDash Towers in north London, we count 69 mainstream secondary schools within a 5km radius. Even omitting independent (ie, private, fee-charging) schools, there are still 35 of them. The corresponding numbers for primary schools are 164 and 118, respectively.

On the other hand, if you live in a rural area then you probably won't be surprised to hear that there are far fewer options and they tend to be much further away. Indeed, a parish councillor wrote to us to describe their situation in which, following the recent closure of a local school, there are no mainstream, non-selective state secondary schools at all within many miles. As a result, around a thousand children are now bussed long distances every day, increasing absenteeism and worsening community cohesion. How many other local areas, they wondered, are experiencing something similar? That's a good question to which this post aims to provide some answers.

Distance learning

Figure 1 shows locations in England that lack any primary schools within various distances. By 'location', we mean a Lower layer Super Output Area (LSOA), of which there are about 34,000 in England, typically with around 2,000 people living in each one. In other words, the scale of a small village or a few streets in a town. The distances shown use straight lines, so they don't take into account things like slow or meandering roads and therefore don't necessarily translate directly into journey times. But they still give a good idea of which parts of the country lack local schools.

Very roughly speaking, the average catchment area for a primary school in England has a radius of around 2km, though distances obviously tend to be shorter than this in urban areas and longer in rural ones. It is therefore reassuring to see that the vast majority of locations in England have some kind of primary provision within 3km. If we increase the distance to within 5km then only 13 areas and fewer than 1,400 primary aged children are excluded.

So far so good. But if we want to limit ourselves to only certain types of school then this affects the picture. For example, excluding independent schools increases the numbers ever so slightly, as does excluding oversubscribed schools (those for which at least a third of first-preference applicants were not offered places for the current academic year). Excluding schools with low Ofsted ratings has a much bigger effect, while excluding faith schools has the biggest impact of all, taking the number of primary-age children for whom there is no school within 5km to more than 80,000.

Of course, you may have different ideas about acceptable distances and types of school: use the menu and checkboxes below to set your own criteria and see the effects.

The situation for secondary schools is shown in Figure 2. This uses greater distances because secondary schools are less numerous and tend to have larger catchment areas (very roughly speaking, around 4km radius on average). There is also the additional complexity of grammar schools (ie, selective state schools), which are available only to pupils who pass an entrance exam.

Even if we apply no restrictions, fully 1,350 local areas and over 195,000 pupils have no secondary school at all within 5km, though if we increase this to 10km then the numbers fall to fewer than 100 areas and 13,000 pupils.

As for primary schools, however, the picture for secondary schools can be significantly affected by including or excluding various types of school. For example, at a 10km distance, excluding oversubscribed and grammar schools has relatively little effect, while excluding independent and faith schools makes much more difference. But the single largest impact comes from omitting schools with low Ofsted ratings.

Once again, use the menu and checkboxes below to set your own criteria and see the effects on areas of interest.

Remote access

This situation seems, if anything, likely to get worse in the coming years because school enrolments are falling, driven mainly by declining birth rates. This ultimately results in schools downsizing or even closing. The ever-smaller cohorts have been working their way through primary schools and are now moving into secondary schools too. There is no sign so far of these long-term demographic trends abating. Importantly, they do not affect all schools equally. For example, enrolments at smaller schools and those with lower Ofsted ratings have tended to fall faster than elsewhere. Furthermore, there has been considerable regional variation in changes to overall school capacity. These trends may well reflect differences in local demand, but it's also possible that they don't. For example, a common criticism of the free schools programme (which enables community groups to establish new state-funded schools) is that it has tended to favour places like London, where people who have the wherewithal to set up new schools are disproportionately located even though existing provision is generally good.

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