A portakabin is not a school place.
Primary expansion is the one thing that does happen, because it is the one thing small enough to be funded from a small site: a classroom, a temporary block, a bulge year. That is the ceiling of what dispersed growth can buy.
Secondary is different. A secondary school needs six to eight forms of entry to be viable, which means it needs population concentrated enough to fill it. Growth scattered across forty villages never assembles that, so it does not produce a new secondary — it produces longer bus journeys to schools that are already full, and it produces them for children who will be born into the estates now being approved.
SEND provision, meanwhile, is planned separately, is under acute pressure almost everywhere, and is essentially never delivered through housing contributions at all.
The turn
New settlements get schools designed in — one of the few things about them nobody disputes. Village extensions get a classroom if they are lucky, and a longer bus ride if they are not.
By district — schools over capacity
Across these districts, 165 mainstream schools already have more pupils on roll than their published capacity — 120 primary and 45 secondary. Spare places in one school do not cancel overcrowding in another.
| District | Primary over capacity | Secondary over capacity | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| East Hertfordshire | 12 | 9 | 21 |
| Colchester | 11 | 4 | 15 |
| North Hertfordshire | 13 | 1 | 14 |
| East Suffolk | 10 | 3 | 13 |
| Uttlesford | 10 | 1 | 11 |
| Chelmsford | 7 | 4 | 11 |
| Tendring | 9 | 1 | 10 |
| West Suffolk | 8 | 2 | 10 |
| South Cambridgeshire | 4 | 5 | 9 |
| Braintree | 6 | 3 | 9 |
| Ipswich | 6 | 1 | 7 |
| Maldon | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Cambridge | 3 | 3 | 6 |
| East Cambridgeshire | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Fenland | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Mid Suffolk | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Huntingdonshire | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| Babergh | 1 | 1 | 2 |
Source: DfE Get Information About Schools (Edubase) open extract: open state-funded mainstream primary/secondary schools by district; settlement pages assign schools by Easting/Northing to the nearest listed settlement within 10km (else district figure). Counts are schools with more pupils on roll than published capacity.
Questions
- Don't developers pay for school places?
- They contribute, and the contribution is calibrated to the places their development generates. That funds expansion of existing schools. It does not fund a new secondary, and was never designed to.
- Isn't a temporary classroom fine?
- For a bulge year, yes. As a permanent answer to sustained growth across a whole district, it is how a school ends up at 110% with no hall and no field.
- Would a new settlement really get a secondary school?
- Concentrated development is the only pattern that produces the population density a secondary needs. Whether a specific proposal delivers one depends on the proposal — but scattered growth has a guaranteed answer, and it is no.
- So you're just NIMBYs.
- We want homes built where schools get built. We are currently building homes where classrooms get added.
- Where would you put them instead?
- Somewhere concentrated enough to fill a secondary — not forty villages that can only ever fund a temporary classroom.
- Where do your figures come from?
- DfE Get Information About Schools: open state-funded mainstream primary and secondary schools by district, comparing published SchoolCapacity with NumberOfPupils. This is today's roll against today's places — not the council's longer-term place-planning forecast. If we have got something wrong, email corrections@stopurbansprawl.uk and we will fix it and say what changed.
What's planned near us?
Find the district page for where we live.
All infrastructure topics · The numbers · Corrections
It's clear we don't have enough infrastructure already. So how can the government expect to build another 1,367,880 homes?
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