• 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…

    5.00 Jul. 12th, 2020 | News

  • 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.…

    7.00 Mar. 17th, 2019 | News

  • 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…

    0.01 Sep. 13th, 2018 | News

  • 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…

    5.00 Apr. 8th, 2017 | News

  • NAO capital funding report: £6.7bn needed to rebuild crumbling schools, and 8 other key findings

    The National Audit Office today published its report into capital funding for schools. We have the nine key findings.   1. The school places increase is being met so far – but cracks are showing Demand for school places is continuing to grow. The government says primary place demand will rise by another 220,000 by…

    0.01 Feb. 22nd, 2017 | News

  • School places left out of plans for garden villages

    Tens of thousands of homes are to be built in new self-sufficient “garden villages” and towns across England, but the announcement has prompted questions about school places. The government has given its backing to 17 projects for almost 100,000 new homes and associated infrastructure in areas of need throughout the country. Under the proposals, developers…

    16.08 Jan. 5th, 2017 | News