The pressure on school admissions due to lack of space continues. £23 billion investment in school buildings by 2021?

Today’s latest BBC Education news highlights the huge pressure on school places caused by rising pupil numbers and limited accommodation. As a significant provider of Education sector accommodation, we believe passionately that modular and portable buildings have a massive role to play in getting the requisite accommodation in place, swiftly and effectively:

BBC extract, 22nd January:

“Across England, just under half of schools, 46%, have more applications than places.
But in London, two-thirds of schools are oversubscribed. And in some boroughs, such as Greenwich, Kensington and Chelsea and Lewisham, 80% of schools lack enough places for the demand.

In Wales, there is less pressure on places, with 13% of schools oversubscribed.

For 393 schools, pupils will not get a place if they live more than 500m away and for 91 schools, it depended on living within a distance of 300m.

This is again a bigger issue in London, where there are 300 schools where pupils have to live within 750m, compared with 14 in the North East.

The analysis also looked at the impact of a “sibling rule”, where schools give priority to the brothers and sisters of existing pupils.The study found that on average, 5% of places are taken by siblings, reducing the availability of places for others.

FindASchool founder Ed Rushton said that looking for a school place could be very stressful and that parents could face a “confusing array” of different admissions rules.

For individual schools this become “convoluted and opaque”, he said, with one primary school in Rotherham having 23 different levels of priority for 16 reception class places.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We want every parent to have access to a good school place for their child. Despite rising pupil numbers, 95% of parents received an offer at one of their top three preferred schools this year and we recently committed to investing £23 billion in school buildings by 2021.

“It is for local authorities to ensure they have sufficient school places for their pupils.”