Report to Scrutiny
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Report to Scrutiny Item Number: Contains Confidential Or No Exempt Information Update on the School Expansion Programme and Site Subject of Report: Acquisitions Meeting: Overview and Scrutiny Committee Adam Whalley Service report author: [email protected] 020 8825 9420 Keith Fraser Scrutiny officer: [email protected] 020 8825 7497 Cabinet Responsibility: Cllr Binda Rai, Children and Young People Director Responsibility: Judith Finlay, Executive Director Children and Adults The report sets out current and projected demands for Brief: school places and outlines the steps underway to ensure continuity of provision. i) To comment on the report Recommendations: ii) To consider whether to send an informative to Cabinet on the subject of this report. 1 1. Update on the School Expansion Programme and Site Acquisitions The purpose of this report is to update the Overview and Scrutiny Committee on the progress of the Council’s school expansion programme, current pupil projections (including for pupils with Special Educational Needs), site acquisitions and possible next steps to support the Education Funding Agency in acquiring sites for planned Free Schools. This report has been prepared in parallel with an update to Cabinet which is due to be considered in the Cabinet meeting of 18 October 2016. Updates are provided separately on primary, secondary and special educational needs provision. Primary School Places, 4- 11 year olds Current programme The significant increase in births between 2002/3 and 2010/11 has meant continued pressure on Ealing primary schools. Expansion of primary school places in Ealing began in 2008, with more than half of all schools now having either expanded or taken at least one bulge class to date. The current primary expansion programme will have provided 34.5 forms of entry (FE) in permanent expansions by 2017 (with 33 FE of these available as permanent school places in September 2016). Most of these have been provided by expanding existing schools, but 7FE have been provided in four new schools, Holy Family, Ark Priory and Ark Byron in Acton and St Mary’s in Southall. A further new 2FE primary free school, Floreat Southall, which had been granted approval to open in 2016 by the Department for Education has subsequently been deferred. In total (including 2.5FE in bulge classes) we will provide 4,830 reception places in September 2016, compared to the 2008 baseline of 3,769 places. This is to meet the demand generated by 5,750 live births for the cohort of children who reached reception age in September 2016. The rising birth rate has been the key factor influencing the increase in demand for places in Ealing, with a 31% rise in births over the eight year period between 2002/03 and 2010/11. This increase in births has been driven by migrant communities, with births to mothers born in England actually declining during this period and the proportion of births to mothers born outside of the UK increasing from 57% to 72% of births. The September 2015 intake (born in 2010/11) appears to represent the peak in births and births have now dropped back to a provisional 5,318 in 2014/15 (the September 2019 intake). The latest published calendar year data for 2015 indicates births have come down still further to 5,210. 2 Table 1 Births over time with corresponding year of entry to reception Year Entry into Entry into Number of births reception year 7 Births 01-02 Sep 06 Sep 13 4,386 Births 02-03 Sep 07 Sep 14 4,469 Births 03-04 Sep 08 Sep 15 4,599 Births 04-05 Sep 09 Sep 16 4,841 Births 05-06 Sep 10 Sep 17 4,976 Births 06-07 Sep 11 Sep 18 5,231 Births 07-08 Sep 12 Sep 19 5,573 Births 08-09 Sep 13 Sep 20 5,578 Births 09-10 Sep 14 Sep 21 5,829 Births 10-11 Sep 15 Sep 22 5,843 Births 11-12 Sep 16 Sep 23 5,750 Births 12-13 Sep 17 Sep 24 5,606 Births 13-14 Sep 18 Sep 25 5,442 Births 14-15 Sep 19 Sep 26 5,318 (provisional) Future Programme The GLA reviewed their birth projections in 2016 and are now estimating that births in Ealing will fall gradually to just below 5,200 over the next ten years. Our latest projections (which are now based on the current three year average birth to reception ratio of 79.9%) project that we will need to provide sufficient places for 4,587 children entering reception classes across the borough in 2016, dropping to 4,472 in 2017 and then to between 4250 and 4350 from 2018 onwards. Once the current schemes are fully implemented we will have 4,800 permanent reception places available across the borough. Based on current projections this would represent a borough level surplus of between 4 and 5% this year rising to between 9 and 11% from 2018 onwards. We therefore now expect to have enough places to meet demand and provide a reasonable buffer to cope with in year admissions and fluctuations in retention in the Acton, Ealing and Greenford, Northolt, Perivale (GNP) areas of the borough for at least the next five years. We will however continue to closely monitor the demand for places in Southall, where birth increases came later. We had expected to need to provide further places in Southall South to the meet the demand generated by higher birth years entering reception from September 2016. However we have revised our projections downwards after the admissions for September 2016 were lower than projected, indicating a further drop in the birth to reception retention in Southall South this year. We have still progressed with a 1FE bulge class at Clifton for September 2016 (meaning that there will be 540 places available) but held back on adding a further bulge class at another school. This option remains available for future years if required. Floreat Southall free school, which deferred entry in 2016, may also provide further additional places in Southall. 3 Secondary School Places, 11- 16 year olds Current Programme The significant increase in births has just begun to impact on the secondary sector (with the September 2015 intake representing the first cohort since births began to rise and the size of the potential intake rising sharply year on year from September 2016). There are currently surplus places in the secondary sector, primarily concentrated in the west of the borough at two schools in the Greenford, Northolt and Perivale (GNP) planning area. This contrasts with a shortage of places in the east of the borough in the Ealing and Acton areas. To date, we have delivered a 2FE expansion in Southall in 2012 and added a new 6FE high school in Greenford in 2013. A further 8FE in permanent capacity has been made available from September 2016 in Ealing in two existing high schools (Brentside High School and Elthorne Park High School) and one new Free School (Ealing Fields High School, which has opened on a temporary site). An additional 2FE will then be available in Greenford High School from 2018. There will also be a 1FE bulge class in an existing high school in Southall (Featherstone High School) from 2016, which will then become permanent from 2017. Future Programme In total, there will be 3,426 year 7 places available in September 2016, rising to 3,486 from September 2018. Despite these agreed increases, once the significantly higher numbers of children currently progressing through our primary schools transfer into high school, we expect to have a further overall shortfall in capacity in year 7 from September 2018, and are projecting the need for 6 further forms of entry at secondary level by September 2018, rising to a total of 11FE by September 2019 and 13 by 2021. This is to meet the demand generated by a projected 3,817 children transferring to our secondary schools in 2019 (compared to 2,962 in 2015/16). Plans are in place to meet this need through the establishment of two further new Free Schools (an Ark High School and North Twyford High School) which together would provide 12.5FE of secondary places and are detailed further below. These projections assume that the primary (year 6) to secondary (year 7) retention ratio will have recovered back to 85% by 2019. The current ratio is 80.6%, which is higher than the previous year (79.3%) but remains historically low. Ealing currently exports 26% of its secondary age children to out borough state funded high schools (January 2016), while importing only 11% of its high school intake. In total the net difference is now almost 3000 children, an increase of 600 in the past three years, making Ealing the largest net exporter of secondary pupils in London by some margin – with cross border flows between Hounslow (1028), Hillingdon (829) and Hammersmith and Fulham (422) contributing the bulk of the net exports. This has been largely due to demand significantly outstripping capacity in the Ealing area of the borough, where the current secondary schools are operating at full capacity. The latest admission figures suggest that this figure will recover to 83.5% this year, with the availability of additional places in popular existing schools and the opening of Ealing Fields Free School. We feel it is then pertinent to plan for an incremental rise in retention back to 85% by 2019, given 4 that all high schools in the borough are now rated good or outstanding by Ofsted and given the likely popularity of agreed additional places at Greenford High School and the proposed new North Twyford and Ark secondary Free Schools.