School Place Planning Strategy
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School Place Planning Strategy Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames November 2020 1 CONTENTS Page Subject 3 Background 7 Developments since June 2017 10 Primary phase 20 Secondary phase 23 Special schools, specialist resource provisions and SEND forecasting 28 Early Years 31 Financial implications 31 Contact 32 Appendix 1: Reception class capacity, 2008–2020 33 Appendix 2: Year 7 capacity, 2012–2020 34 Appendix 3: SRP capacity 37 Appendix 4: Growth in SEND school places, 2017–2028 38 Appendix 5: Approved and proposed housing developments in the borough 2 1. BACKGROUND 1.1 In June 2017, Kingston Council’s then Growth Committee adopted a revised School Place Planning Strategy, following the adoption of a previous version in November 2012 which was revised in March 2013. 1.2 This report therefore: provides an update on the provision of new school places since the June 2017 Strategy, and; analyses demand for additional school places, particularly in the secondary phase and for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND); considers how that demand could be met; and gives options for securing local school provision, to ensure that children and young people can be educated within their home community, without being dependent on private car usage for home to school travel. 1.3 Assumptions regarding long-term demand are based upon the Greater London Authority’s and the Office of National Statistics’ pupil and general population projections respectively, but are naturally more speculative than those used to inform the short- to medium-term demand. 1.4 The Mayor’s ‘Intend to Publish’ new London Plan (December 2019)1 sets a target for an additional 9,640 net new homes, including 2,250 from small sites, to be provided in Kingston Borough over a 10 year period between 2019/2020 and 2028/2029, equating to 1,364 per year. Assessing the impact of this target is difficult, and is difficult to plan for in a pre-emptive manner, other than by the general principle of working closely with Council planning strategy officers to ensure that any large-scale housing developments are flagged up and considered, in terms of the need for additional school places, at the earliest possible opportunity. 1.5 In addition, paragraphs 2.1.24–2.1.26 of the Mayor’s ‘Intend to Publish’ new London Plan identifies Kingston as an ‘Opportunity Area’: The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames’s network of town centres with their good levels of public transport accessibility have been identified as areas capable of accommodating development and intensification to provide leisure, cultural and night-time activity, commercial and retail uses, as well as high density housing. A Direction of Travel document was adopted in 2016 to guide planning policies in these areas. In particular it identified four areas where there is scope for significant change: • Kingston Town Centre • Norbiton, London Road and Cambridge Road Estate • New Malden • Tolworth 1 https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/intend_to_publish_-_clean.pdf. 3 These areas are capable of supporting some development in the short and medium term. However, once Crossrail 2 is operational, the borough will benefit from more Crossrail 2 stations than any other and the arrival of the new, higher frequency, higher capacity service will enable significant additional growth opportunities in these areas. It will improve Kingston’s attractiveness as an office location and therefore support additional commercial growth in the town centre, building on links with Kingston University and Kingston College. The Local Plan and/or Planning Framework should set out how Crossrail 2 will support and deliver further growth and intensification in these areas. It should also explore how the use of industrial land can be intensified to make more efficient use of land. Kingston town centre, with its ancient market is rich in heritage and forms an important part of the setting of Hampton Court Palace, its gardens, the Thames and surrounding Royal Parks. In the longer term, and following the opening of Crossrail 2 in the 2030s, there may be potential for selective redevelopment in the following areas: • Berrylands Station and Hogsmill Valley • Chessington 1.6 The Mayor’s ‘Intend to Publish’ new London Plan goes on to state that, To ensure there is a sufficient supply of good quality education and childcare facilities to meet demand and offer educational choice, boroughs should: 1) Prepare Development Plans that are informed by a needs assessment of education and childcare facility needs. Needs should be assessed locally and sub- regionally, addressing cross-boundary issues. Needs assessments should include an audit of existing facilities. 2) Identify sites for future provision through the Development Plan process, particularly in areas with significant planned growth or need for school places (including Special Educational Needs and Disability places). 3) Ensure that development proposals for housing and commercial facilities incorporate suitable childcare provision and encourage nursery provision within primary schools, where there is a need. This Strategy therefore includes an audit of existing state-funded school capacity insofar as that can be objectively assessed for schools which are outside the Council’s control. 1.7 More generally, the Plan also states that, There is a growing need for school places in London, with projected need for 705,000 mainstream state-funded primary school places required for the academic year 2018/19. This is an increase of 7,000 over the number of places required in 2016/17. The level of need is projected to fall to 686,000 places a year by 2027/28. In 2016/17, there was a need for 403,000 places in mainstream state-funded secondary schools. The number of places required is projected to increase by 65,000, over the period to 2027/28. This need, particularly for secondary school places, requires a strategic approach to delivery, making it harder to quantify within 4 individual boroughs. Boroughs are encouraged to work together to meet the needs for secondary school places. Where possible, sites for schools should be allocated within Development Plans. There is a need for an increase in Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) provision in London and it is important that these places are planned for. 1.8 It is considered that the work undertaken to provide additional school places in the last 10 years has given the borough a solid platform from which it can meet the challenges of the coming years. However, forecasting and meeting demand for school places in a borough where educational standards and parental expectations are generally high is not, and never has been, straightforward, not least because of rivers, major roads and railways which present barriers to changed school admission patterns: the Thames, the Hogsmill, the A3 (Kingston by- pass) and the south-west mainline railway. 1.9 It should be acknowledged that the significant progress made in recent times has involved the usage of much of the usable space on existing schools’ sites. It is also the case that opportunities for the Council or the Department for Education (DfE) and its agencies to acquire and use new sites for school provision have become much scarcer. 1.10 It is noted, too, that despite the Council’s wish to see school places provided locally, where they are needed, its inability, by law, to establish state-funded schools and to decide the location of new schools are constraints which impede its efforts to meet is statutory duty, as outlined in Section 14 of the Education Act 1996 (as amended), to provide school places for residents, and particularly within their home community. 1.11 It should be borne in mind that several different factors influence forecast and actual pupil numbers: Live-birth data On-roll numbers; Historical admission patterns; Economic change, i.e. post-Covid downturn/recession leading to more parents/carers opting for state-funded schools or upturn leading to more parents/carers opting for private schools; Migration patterns, both from and to countries outside the UK, possibly as result of the ‘Brexit factor,’ and from within the UK, particularly from inner to outer London; Housing development / regeneration; Parental perception of individual schools, which can sometimes be historical and not reflective of current educational standards, either good or not; Ofsted inspection outcomes for state-funded schools both in and outside the borough; and Provision of additional, or removal of, school places in neighbouring local authority areas. Any combination of these factors is complex and therefore not straightforward to predict. The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic have added to that complexity. 1.12 Despite the many contingent factors, the DfE’s quality assurance places Kingston in the top quartile nationally for the accuracy of its pupil forecasts: in June 2019, the DfE published their 5 ‘Local Authority School Places Scorecards’2 for 2018, which showed very small over-forecasts of primary numbers and under-forecasts of secondary: Phase Accuracy within the previous year Accuracy within the previous three years Primary +0.3% +1.0% Secondary -0.6% -1.8% The 2019 scorecards3, published in June 2020, were as follows: Phase Accuracy within the previous year Accuracy within the previous three years Primary -0.8% +2.8% Secondary -0.2% -1.0% 1.13 With a large number of major planning applications having been approved in the last few years and with others due to come forward, it has become necessary to create a Kingston Borough specific formula for estimating the likely ‘pupil yield’. In order to start that work, a cross-party working group met twice earlier in 2020, and recommended that survey work be undertaken with households in some recently-occupied large housing developments.