school places | Schools Week

How hostile immigration policies are ‘piling misery on to children’

Thousands of traumatised Afghan children, displaced by the Taliban, face educational disruptions and funding shortfalls in the UK.

Kent admits it has not run out of school places amid migrant crisis

Kent council leaders said last week there were no Year 7 or 9 school places in some areas of the county due to the “unexpected” arrival of refugee children

Breach school capacity and class limits if needed for Ukrainian children, says DfE

Schools can exceed their published admission numbers and class size limits to ensure children from Ukraine have places

Councils cut primary school places as baby boom flattens

Pupil numbers are expected to fall by around 300,000 over the next five years

Admissions shake-up in September to end struggle for in-year school places

The Department for Education has confirmed a shake-up of in-year admissions to stop schools turning away “challenging” pupils will come into force in September. It also set out multiple changes to the reforms first proposed last June after analysing consultation feedback from councils, academy trusts and parents. Previous investigations by Schools Week have revealed how vulnerable […]

Councils scramble for places as school-building falls behind

Covid-19 has left pressured councils scrambling to complete building projects on time, a Schools Week investigation has found. The pandemic halted construction in most sectors, leaving some councils resorting to contingency plans and others with projects going to the wire. Analysis by Schools Week of local authority school place scorecard data, published by the Department […]

Rejected special school bids in areas facing biggest shortfalls

The majority of local authorities that have been refused new specialist schools will run out of places three years from now, Schools Week analysis shows. The Department for Education announced on Monday that 39 local authorities had been successful in their bids for new special needs or alternative provision schools, out of 65 to apply. […]

The 6 key points from EPI’s ‘Secondary School Choice in England’ report

The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has published new analysis looking at how parents choose which secondary schools to send their children to in England. Each child can list up to six secondary schools they want to apply to, which parents rank in order of preference. These are submitted to the local authority who then allocate […]

Leicester must create 2,200 school places – in just one year

Some councils must expand their school capacity by 12 per cent in the next 18 months to meet demand for places, new figures suggest. The Department for Education (DfE) this week updated its local authority school places scorecards – documents that show how councils fare in their duties to create extra capacity and how many […]