26
Examination of witnesses
Heather Sandy Steve Rollett, and Yolande Burgess.
Q1 The Chair: I formally welcome Steve Rollett, Heather Sandy and Yolande Burgess, who will introduce themselves briefly before we start our questioning.
This is the first oral session of our inquiry into falling school rolls. A transcript will be taken, which you will receive. If you want to make any minor amendments, obviously, please send in your corrections. I remind members that, if they have a specific interest in this inquiry, they should declare it before they ask their question. I welcome our witnesses again and ask each of them to introduce themselves briefly, including their role and their interest in this inquiry.
Steve Rollett: Good morning. It is great to be here with you. I am the deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts. We are the sector body for school trusts—that is, organisations running academy schools in England—and we have three fundamental purposes. One is to support trusts in the work they do. One is to produce guidance, resources and so on for them. The other job we do is advocating on their behalf to the Government and others.
Yolande Burgess: Good morning. Thank you for this invitation. I am the strategy director for communities and public service reform at London Councils. We are bought by and for the boroughs in London. We work with all of the boroughs, particularly in relation to school places. We have done quite a lot of research on school rolls in London, so I am pleased to be here and hearing about the experiences of others around the country.
Heather Sandy: Good morning, everyone. I am the director of children’s services in Lincolnshire. I also chair the inclusive education policy for the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, which is the sector body for directors of children’s services. I am delighted to be here; thank you for having me.
Q2 The Chair: Thank you very much. I should declare an interest as a member of a primary school academy trust in south Manchester.
How do each of you think the demand for primary school places will change over the coming period? How do you expect it to change? How do your organisations represent the forecasting of demand for primary schools? Do your organisations have the resources and capabilities to contribute effectively to that? Who would like to go first?
Steve Rollett: I will kick us off. We very much get feedback on this issue from members on the ground. It has been bubbling up for a while, I think, particularly in London—obviously, Yolande can speak to the London context—but it is now entrenched across much more of the education system.
On the national figures, the Department for Education’s forecasts are predicting a fall of around 300,000 pupils between 2025 and 2030. That very much correlates with the experience on the ground that our members are talking to us about. What we are picking up is that, although there is a sense that this started in London and is spreading elsewhere, it is very different in different regions and localities. There is huge diversity in how it manifests, in the solutions that are being found locally and, probably, in its long-term effects.
Yolande Burgess: On Steve’s last comment about variation, it is important for me to say that, in London, there is also variation while we are still seeing significant drops. It is not uniform, although we are seeing overall demand fall.
On Steve’s other point, it feels like this happened in London first because it did. Between 2017-18 and 2024-25, we saw a significant reduction in the pupil census: around 50,000 pupils across all year groups. That was quite significant. Some of the analysis from London Councils across all the boroughs is now forecasting a 2.5% fall in reception demand between 2025-26 and 2029-30. In London, that equates to around 2,200 or 2,300 pupils.
I come back to the variation point. Variation masks the fact that there is some growth in eight of our boroughs. It is important to note that. However, if you then take those boroughs out, the remaining boroughs are seeing an average reduction of just over 6%. The average is felt more strongly in those boroughs. We are also seeing that reduction sharpest in inner London boroughs; inner London is seeing the bulk of that reduction of just over 6%, if you will, whereas it is around 1% in the outer London boroughs.
Of course, this means that we are now seeing a secondary wave start to happen. Using some of the analysis that we have gathered from our own work and from working directly with our boroughs, we are forecasting a fall of around 3.8% in year 7 demand over the same period. Again, inner London seems to be feeling that more sharply, at around 7.2%. Although the effects between primary and secondary will be different, because secondary may feel the effects in a way where they are harder to manage—in terms of the effect on the curriculum and so on—this is obviously something we want to keep an eye on.
On your question about doing the analysis, the capacity is there because this is such a fundamental part of what boroughs do around place planning. It is quite an important feature. The issue here is that, although the technical process is quite mature—certainly in what we are seeing in London—the things you need to look at to be able to forecast well, such as migration, housing delivery, temporary accommodation and parental preference, are less easy to navigate.
Those variations and variabilities in projections can make things a little harder. I would probably suggest that forecasting is quite mature right across the country.
The Chair: So you are reasonably certain that those forecasts are reliable and policy can be based on them in an effective way.
Yolande Burgess: Yes. We work closely with colleagues from the Department for Education, I am delighted to say. I think that the last set of SCAT returns that were sent in were something like 98% accurate, so there were very high levels of accuracy.
Heather Sandy: Just to build on that, one thing that is very important is the impact on rural areas. Before we saw the pressure in London we saw it hit some of our rural areas. When that pressure hits rural areas, it is much more intense, because the schools are smaller, so the impact on viability becomes much quicker and harder, and they have to make really difficult decisions. I echo the point that the demand changes are not moving in a single direction everywhere. Even within Lincolnshire, for example, where we have corridors of growth and new housing, we can see pressures on school places. We are still building expansions to schools in Lincolnshire.
But in other areas, we are starting to see that decline. In rural areas, we are starting to see three groups of schools. We have our rural villages and sparse communities, and that is a real challenge. It has a significant community impact, where we start to see schools lose their viability in those small areas. In our urban areas in market towns, we are starting to see some pressures, as we see housing growth. In our coastal areas, we see seasonal variation, which is really challenging, because you cannot reduce capacity. If we know that in Skegness, for example, we are going to have a big influx, that needs to be serviced at that time. It particularly impacts on economically fragile areas, where sustaining that can be difficult.
I agree with what everyone else has said: we are seeing that fall, which is structural and looks to be set into the medium and long term. We are good at projecting it, but there are some challenges, as we have said, around predicting parental preference and housing. Getting a really good indication of housing growth is really important to us. Economic success changes where people live and where they choose to bring up families. Those factors are harder for us, and I think that we use all the tools that are available to us—but as we go through the other reforms that we see nationally, working collaboratively across wider areas, having support from Government to do that will be really important. We are working really hard with the tools we have, but there are other tools that would help us as we move forward.
The Chair: We may come back to that point.
Baroness Pidgeon: Can I have some clarity on what you mean by seasonal with your coastal schools? Are you saying that people move in for a few months to work the summer season, then go and take their children elsewhere, or that children are home-schooled and then schooled? I am not sure that I understand.
Heather Sandy: Yes. We have some communities that come and live in our coastal areas for the summer season, and travelling communities that come in significant numbers in the summer season. We have people who come to our temporary accommodation, such as our caravan sites, and live in those caravan sites and register at schools. We have a whole range of coastal flux to the population, and our schools are brilliant at responding to that—but it means that part of the year they can have pressure on capacity and other parts of year they can have lower capacity. Staffing for that can be a challenge.
Baroness Pidgeon: Where do the children go in the winter season?
Heather Sandy: It depends on the type of children. If they are part of the travelling children, they will go wherever the travelling community goes. Some people might have another house that they go to; some people will change their renting—they will come and rent for the summer season in our area, so it will depend on family choice.
Q3 Baroness Hollins: I am just interested in whether the rise and interest in home schooling is having an effect on demand and predicting demand, and whether it is particularly important in any part of the country or type of community.
Heather Sandy: We have seen a significant rise in parents choosing to electively home educate. It is really hard to predict, because it is about parental choice. It tends to involve lower numbers across the whole, so it is a factor in the planning. I would not say that it is the most significant factor in the planning, but it is a factor. Where it can become quite challenging is where you have parents who choose to electively home educate, remove their child from roll, then change their mind, or the quality of the education is not suitable and they want to put the child back on roll, or they asked to put the child back on roll, and that capacity is no longer there. It can be a real challenge.
Yolande Burgess: I agree with Heather there. It is difficult to predict—it is a factor, but not a predominant factor. We are also looking at home-educated children and special education needs as well. That is something to look at a bit more closely.
Steve Rollett: That also resonates with our experience and the feedback that we get from our members. Yes, there has been an increase, but I do not think that it is the main explanation for what we are seeing. The other thing that we would say is that we tend to hear it more at secondary than at primary. That is another reason why it is probably a limited part of the picture at primary.
Lord Mott: I have just a follow-up on that, Heather, in terms of the moves in the coastal communities. Is there any co-ordination across the UK, either through the department or at a council-by-council level to try to track the movement of those families? Yolande, on the eight London boroughs that have seen growth, are there any particular features of those boroughs that join them up? I can think about where some of them might be, but it would be good to get your view on that.
Heather Sandy: On the tracker, when a child moves to another school, the schools communicate really well and do a really good handover and support with that assessment. With the travelling community, that is more challenging in terms of them knowing which school their children are going to go to at the destination that they arrive at. Usually, if they are then put into a school, the co-ordination will happen at that point. Schools are really good at making sure the files are transferred. If there were to be other involvement from children’s services, that transfer and planning would happen. If that were not to happen, it would cause us to take action.
Yolande Burgess: If there is a defining feature for those eight London boroughs, they are not inner-London boroughs. That is an important factor. If you were looking at things like rental costs and house prices in London, you would see them start to increase quite significantly when you come into inner London. We are conscious of the fact that housing prices and rental costs and so on will have an impact. I am also conscious that that is no longer just a London issue any more—but it is certainly a very specific driver, because of housing and rental costs in London.
Lord Mott: Just as an example, because I live in an outer London borough but I would not say that our housing costs are less than in inner London, what are the sort of boroughs we are talking about? Are they Bexley, Harrow, Richmond?
Yolande Burgess: They are Barking, Dagenham, Havering, Brent, Hounslow, Ealing and Barnet—but we will send this information through. In some instances, you see quite large predicted increases, such as in Barking and Dagenham. Let us also bear in mind that Barking and Dagenham have had a decade’s worth of significant regeneration—which links to some of the comments about regeneration that Heather made about her area too. But a key feature is that they are not in London.
Q4 Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: I have just two very short questions. First, is it related to the Elizabeth Line in London? Secondly, I live in a rural coastal community and I know that the schools get money when those extra children come, because years ago I chaired one. But what happens to the funding when you leave? If you are in Lincolnshire and you go for the whole of the summer term, does that primary school lose out on that term’s funding?
Heather Sandy: There are two data points at which they capture pupil numbers. I hope that I get this right, and I can clarify afterwards, but I think that one is October and one is January. They are the two points that set the school funding. If those children are there in October, you would get it, and if they arrived after that you would not. So then in January you have the second set of data, so that can be challenging.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: So if they do not move until the Easter term, the places that they move to lose out.
Heather Sandy: Yes. The funding mechanisms are a challenge for growing schools, predominantly, and there are problems for those schools that are declining. It is a problem specifically for smaller schools. I think it is really important for the committee to be aware of how sharply three children leaving can have an impact.
Movement is a problem for schools that are expanding. Where you get an increase, but not quite enough to get the class that you need, and then more come in and you do need the class; that is a challenge.
Yolande Burgess: I will just finish that sentence off in relation to the way the funding works for in-year admissions. It becomes a problem for local authorities when you are trying to manage surplus places. If you have families looking to place their children in a school that is declining, but you do not hit the right point in time, you then have to wait for funding. When thinking about how your admissions are funded, I think is quite important.
The honest answer to your question about the Elizabeth Line—which is a brilliant question, and we are going to go away and have a look—is: I do not know.
The Chair: So, if they arrive in the summer season for whatever reason, they would not be counted at all.
Heather Sandy: No. If they were still there in September, they would be counted for the following year. In-year is an interesting part of the story. In-year admissions are really hard for local authorities, and they are hard for schools. The problem is that, if you have a child who comes into an area and wants a place half way through the academic year, schools have set up their classrooms, and they have set up their staffing ratios.
The problem for local authorities is that the statutory duty still sits with us. We do not want to be instructing our schools to take. We can go through that process, but it is a lengthy process for families and for children, and they can be out of school. That is part of the conversation that we could have about local authorities having all of those statutory duties and fewer levers now than we used to have. We must recognise that it is really difficult for schools to have an influx of children half way through, just as it is hard to have them leave half way through as well.
Q5 Lord Mott: We have drifted very nicely into my question, but I am keen to dig into a little bit more detail. You have mentioned the coastal schools, Heather, which are very interesting, and also the rural ones. Are there any other types of school where the change in demand for primary schools is causing an issue? Steve, would you like to respond?
Steve Rollett: Yes. I will try to put some meat on those bones. Heather talks about the effect of a very small number of children leaving particularly small, often rural, primary schools. Where five pupils depart from a school, that is something in the region of £25,500 pounds. When you think about it, that is a significant part of the cost of a teacher for a year.
The schools that are vulnerable to that are small, rural primary schools, not just because they are small, rural primary schools, but because the budget is obviously tight. So I suppose the answer to your question is that, any school with a tight set of budgetary constraints is, by definition, vulnerable to this.
There are some issues with the national funding formula, unevenness across the system, and the ability of the national funding formula to respond to this. There are also schools where, for example, you have got children with high needs and the cost of meeting that provision. Of course, there is also vulnerability in specialist settings where we know that budgetary constraints are often very tough, while there is a large cost base that the setting needs to meet those children’s needs.
The cost base is very hard for schools. If you lose five pupils, you will lose £25,500, as I have just said, but you cannot cut a teacher in half. The way that budgeting works in the school is that you tend to work on the basis of a class. It is hard for schools that find themselves on the cusp of those nice round numbers of how many teachers are needed to meet the provision of the whole class to cut their cloth accordingly.
That is why you will sometimes find the situation that Heather was just talking about. In-year admissions can be hard for schools because it could be that taking on that additional child or couple of children could then tip them into a difficult case: “Now we need a whole other class to meet the needs of these children, yet we are only getting a very small amount of money.” The cost base is often fixed while the income, obviously, is not. There is something more that we need to do in that space, I think.
Lord Mott: Do you find that for some schools in that position, where they almost on a cliff edge, it is also impacting on staff recruitment? Teachers may say, “We are not quite sure whether we are going to have a job or not”. Does it also impact on parents, who might say, “Well, we want to send our children to the small school, but we would probably rather find one a little bit further away where we know there is some stability”?
Heather Sandy: I think what you are hitting on is the other group of schools—the schools that are less popular for parental preference. They are the ones that get hit by this. When you see that demographic decline, the really popular schools do not decline. They keep their funding, they keep their curriculum planning, they keep their recruitment, they keep their great stuff. Then it shuffles all the way through to the least popular school, which is hardest hit by any kind of demographic change in an area.
Often, that school is the school in the very area where you would want a great school for the pupils, with the best staff. If you could do the planning across an area, it is where you would put your most talented teachers. That is a real challenge.
Everything schools can do to keep their numbers up, such as marketing, attracts parents. If you can say, “Look at our curriculum, look at our staff, look at our results”, parents will want their children to go there. Those schools with a declining role might have to move to mixed-age classes. Like you say, they might have to let teachers go. They might have to stop recruiting. Then parents think, “I am going to send my child to the other school.”
You see that kind of shuffle, which disproportionately affects the most vulnerable schools. These are often the schools serving the most vulnerable communities, who tend to get poorer Ofsted outcomes if you look at the analysis. As a system, these are the schools we would all want to be the very best because they have the children who need the very best education.
Yolande Burgess: I completely echo that. The first order impact is quite often financial, but the second order impact is educational. Particularly if it is unmanaged, you have got potential erosion of standards, inclusion and then confidence. That second order impact is around standards, inclusion and also parental confidence.
I am particularly taken by Heather’s comments that the impact is often felt harder by those schools that are serving the most disadvantaged students. It starts to feel almost like a structural bias. As Heather pointed out, these are often schools that will have lower confidence in terms of Ofsted, gradings, et cetera, so it becomes a horrible, almost self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways.
The final point that was made is quite important. The National Audit Office report showed the scale of potential loss of funding. Those projections show that it was close to £300 million in respect of pupil funding.
For us, it is not just about the funding. It genuinely is about how a school tries to manage it in the best way possible, working with their local authority, potentially working with other schools. Something has to give because, as Steve said, the cost base is so fixed.
That is why our concern is about how we support schools to manage while not eroding inclusion, standards, et cetera. That is a really important part of what we do to genuinely structurally manage falling school rolls.
Heather Sandy: I would just add quickly that the bit around parental confidence become cyclic. As parental confidence declines, that becomes the word in the community. In rural communities, it becomes a community stability issue because people stop buying houses in that area. If we have to close a school, that has a massive impact on rural communities, because house prices decline and we start to see that parental confidence have a massive impact. We have had schools where we think, “Actually, if this community all sent their children to this school, it would be thriving”. Quite rightly, parents are making choices based on the interests of their individual child, but that becomes a community stability issue. That is why I think local authorities are very reluctant to close schools, and understand, when we choose to do so, what a devastating impact that can have on communities.
Yolande Burgess: It is a decision of last resort.
Heather Sandy: It is.
Q6 Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: What are the immediate implications of falling demand for primary schools? You have given us some of them but, also, what are the key factors influencing these changes? One question we have not tackled today is: do you think there is a maximum amount of time that primary school children should be expected to travel? That almost comes back to the rural question, but it is one that we are quite interested in.
Heather Sandy: The immediate impact is, as we said, delayed recruitment, frozen recruitment, staffing reductions, restructuring, more mixed-age class teaching, which means narrower curriculum, and reduced enrichment—if you have fewer teachers, there will be fewer after-school clubs—less flexibility, as we said, around inclusion and early intervention, and that loss of parental confidence.
In Lincolnshire, we have about 100 schools with fewer than 100 children and about 20 schools with fewer than 50 children. So, when we talk about a loss of £25,000, for some schools, the percentage of the budget that represents is less significant. But you still need a head teacher, a caretaker, cleaners, and all those resources, so that is a real systemic risk.
Yes, there should be a limit on how far children travel. All the work we have done with parents in Lincolnshire tells us that they want their children to go to school as locally as possible, and they want to be able to go to their friend’s house after school—not to have huge, long commutes, to be able to go to the parties after school and to be able to mix with children who are in their communities. I think that is what we would all want for our children.
Very often in rural areas, when a school becomes unviable, the next nearest school is a long way away. We do not have good transport links, we have connectivity issues, and we do not have the kind of road infrastructure that you have in more urban areas. So not only are those schools geographically further away but the travel time can be longer. As those of you who know Lincolnshire will know, you might need to go a small distance and it can be a long journey; it can take three hours to go from one side of Lincolnshire to the other. It is a beautiful county though, I should say, as there might be people watching. But that is definitely a challenge. The other bit is we do not have a Tube system that children can get on or the infrastructure, so our home-to-school transport costs are significant and rising.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: The pragmatist in, I think, many of us in this room would think: if we added the school travel costs in, would it not be better in some places for us to subsidise a rural school in particular, because the total cost might be less and keep things together? Is that a reasonable question?
Heather Sandy: It is a very reasonable question, and we absolutely see that where schools become unviable, that can create a massive cost elsewhere. But at the minute that budgeting is completely separate, is it not? So it is the school budget that becomes unviable, and it is the council’s transport bill that increases in cost. That is a real challenge.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: My last question on this—others might want to come in—is: where does health come in in this? My background is in health. I would not have wanted most five year-olds in the village in which I live to have to go an hour to school and an hour back. For children of four and three-quarters in particular, that is a pretty exhausting day. Does that not affect learning?
Yolande Burgess: Obviously, London does not look like Heather’s place of work and life, but you can spend three hours getting from one borough to another depending on what the traffic looks like. That said, I think we all would want to support active travel for children, in addition to, as you say, some of the additional mental well-being issues. Exactly as Heather just said, you want them to be able to go to their parties. Certainly, when you get to the latter part of primary school, you are going to be doing homework as well—all those sorts of things. That is quite an important part of what we are talking about here.
I want to just come back on the inclusion risk a bit more, because we are also all dealing with—we are particularly feeling it in London—falling school rolls coinciding with significant increase in need, particularly in special educational needs and support for mental well-being; the mental health decline in children and young people has been startling, particularly post Covid. We are trying to manage that dichotomy of the rolls at school falling but you are seeing significant need increasing as well. So, thinking about how we can manage those things as part of our ability to manage surplus places, what might that start to look like? Also, on those travel pressures that we just talked about for all young children, obviously, we also want to make sure that we are planning around ensuring that children with higher need are not inevitably ending up having to travel further because specialist places are so dispersed.
Q7 Baroness Coffey: To give a bit of context, I used to be a Member of Parliament in a rural coastal area. I am slightly surprised to hear that children might be travelling an hour; it seems very odd that those county councils have allowed that to happen. I know that in my own former constituency there originally used to be about 50 schools; that has gone down by about eight. However, what has happened is there have been federations and mergers, and you have head teachers covering more than one, because you also want to get a critical mass of children. You can get quality head teachers, because head teachers get paid more or less on how many children are at their school, depending on the grouping, as you are aware.
It would be interesting to somewhat understand how the admission authorities, working in partnership with the schools, are working together to manage that changing demand. From my experience in Suffolk, it has largely been positive, and most parents want their children to go to a local school, for a lot of the reasons you set out, and then will be more selective about secondary, but some will move their children. We already know that you are more likely to get pupil premium in inner-city schools—it is a much higher percentage. So there is a substantially higher amount of funding already to manage that—not quite so much in rural.
I am conscious, Yolande, that in the evidence that London Councils gave at 3.1 you said to the NAO that you are worried about school standards and pupil outcomes. I would be interested to know how that will happen. You were also concerned that many academies routinely would not co-operate, so it would be good to know how you see the powers of the duty to co-operate working—although it might be early days.
There is one particular thing I am concerned about on the pupil admission numbers. The Government decided that PAN cannot be increased, necessarily, but the schools adjudicator can now get involved. What concerns should parents and Parliament have that, in order to keep certain schools open, PANs might be proactively reduced to keep another school viable while a popular school may end up with fewer children going in? I guess I am pro-children, not pro-bricks.
Yolande Burgess: That is a good way of framing the question. We welcome the duties but they have to work across an area. For example, if the schools adjudicator wants to make a decision about a PAN in school A, that decision has to take into account schools B, C, D and E in that area, which is why it is also important the schools adjudicator works with the local authority.
Heather made a comment around levers, and we know that school type can matter there. For the most part, I think local authorities enjoy good relationships with their local academies. But when you are in very difficult decision territory, particularly in terms of PANs potentially having to close a school—which is truly a decision of last resort—that can cause tension.
The duty to co-operate is good, and, as you say, it is early days. The important thing there will be: how is it exercised and where is it enforceable?—those sorts of things.
The concerns you expressed around educational quality, et cetera, come back to the fixed cost issue. We see in some schools the horrible decisions they are having to make about which staff to cut. Do you get rid of a teaching assistant? Do you look at getting rid of a teacher? Any of those decisions will inevitably have impact, however well a school is managed—and our schools are well managed. I say that for all of us here.
Baroness Coffey: Yolande, schools have already closed in London. Is there evidence to show that that has impacted educational outcomes for the children involved as they have been, I assume, dispersed to other schools? I am trying to get a sense of that.
Yolande Burgess: I would like to go back and get you some proper evidence on that, Baroness Coffey.
Heather Sandy: In relation to being pro-children, not pro-brick, the complexity is that you need enough bricks for all the children. It is really complex. Rather than talk about reducing PAN, I will talk about schools that over-offer above their PAN. We have them. This can happen more at secondary than at primary. They have got the capacity to do that, because it brings in more funding and it allows them to offer more enrichment. Those children come off the roll of another school, and therefore the children left at that school—
Baroness Coffey: We are asking about primary schools, because that is what our inquiry is about.
Heather Sandy: Absolutely, but the problem with strategic planning is that it is about all of the children in an area as well as parental preference, which I accept is important. It is a really complex piece of planning. Parental preference is really important. I am a parent. I understand that everybody wants the school they think will be best for their child. But we need to make sure that we have enough quality school places for every child in the area.
Steve Rollett: I would like to add to that. I agree with Yolande. We have the sense that most of our members work very well with the local authorities. There are instances where those relationships historically have not been as good as we would like. The feedback we get is that, where we have had those historic problems, it is getting better.
With those historic problems, some of the language can a bit unfortunate—"failure to co-operate” or whatever. Actually, what you are really talking about is a system where there are strengths as well as weaknesses, where you have got some competing tensions.
The responsibility of a trust is to make sure that, yes, it does that important, outward-looking work about how it looks after the community— how it plays its role in place. That is a civic responsibility. It is not only for the children that are in that trust, but the children across the community; that is super important. But they do have responsibilities to the children already on their roll. Academies cannot, for example, set deficit budgets. Those financial constraints do become important.
There is another thing that we sometimes see more with linear movement. You may have a school that is below PAN and surrounded by schools that are at capacity. When we are looking to place children, these might often—not always, but often—be children where there are particular needs: behavioural issues, challenges, that sort of stuff.
If we are not careful, the school that has that surplus space can become the school that picks up that need. The academy has a responsibility to think carefully about its ability to meet that need and the impact. If we start to see large numbers of children coming in in that way, what does that mean for the children that you are already catering for?
Those tensions can be really hard to navigate, but there are strengths to that system as well, in making sure that my member academies have really clear roles and responsibilities. They are absolutely about quality first. On your question about quality, that is very much what my members seek.
You talked earlier about how people in the system are already coming together to navigate some of this stuff. We have got some really good beacons. I have talked about small rural primary schools. For example, what used to be called the Diocese of Ely Multi Academy Trust just changed its name; it is now Grace Schools. It is a beacon for what the trust is doing, leveraging that collective capacity of the group to maintain schools that, frankly, would not be viable if the trust was not there.
How do they do that? Some of it is about pooling capacity. We have talked about executive head teachers and so on. It might be about how we get good leaders who can work at scale.
Baroness Coffey: Or teachers work multi-sited.
Steve Rollett: Yes, or teachers work multi-sited. We have also talked about funding. Pooling the annual grant can be an effective measure that some trusts use as well. There are different views on GAG pooling. Some people think that it is good; some people have issues about money that is allocated, in theory, to support children here when we need to support children there. But that sort of flexibility speaks to what we are trying to do here. We are trying to make sure that the system works for all children, and, where the national funding formula perhaps does not fully do that at the moment, our view is that if trusts need to be able to GAG pool to create that flexibility in the system to support those small, rural primary schools, that is probably a good thing, and we need to embrace that flexibility.
Q8 Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: Thank you all very much; I have really enjoyed that evidence. It has been very thoughtful, constructive and fascinating, so I really appreciate it. I first got involved in falling school rolls in the late 1980s, which was the previous decline. I became chair of the education committee in Hackney in 1989, and we inherited a lot of teachers from the ILEA who went under the heading of TAANs—teachers above authorised numbers. There had been some massive planning thing and we could not afford them, truthfully, but we inherited them anyway. It was a huge issue. During that phase of falling rolls I think the system overplanned and overfocused on the problem.
I love the fact that you have talked about the opportunities and flexibility, as Steve just said. I think there are some real opportunities. Of course, that is not to say that there is no problem, but in my question I am going to focus on the opportunities.
First, I think there might be some system opportunities. We were talking earlier about the money following the student, which is the jargon, is it not? But it does not really follow it; it moves in October or February, or not at all. However, it is perfectly plausible to imagine the money literally following the student. We tracked every single vaccinator across Punjab, Pakistan, in real time, all the time, and you could see them on a screen in Lahore. If you can do that, you can definitely have the money following. If a student goes from school A to school B, the money should follow suit, not in October. Or rather it could; I am just talking about system opportunities.
Steve, you mentioned the national funding formula and I can see the issues. But you are not saying you are against the national funding formula, are you?
Steve Rollett: No, I am not against it. It is just that we have a sense that it does not currently reflect that cost base, and again, it is unevenly dispersed across the system.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I spent years of my life trying to get to a national funding formula in the Blair years. But anyway, we finally got there after that. “Flexibility” was the word you used, which I think is very important in this.
Then there are other opportunities about what happens when you get to an unpopular school. One option is to close it, another is to close it and replace it with another school on the same site, and another would be to change it in a way that it makes it popular. All of these are options before you simply close it.
We have not talked about it, but you are obviously expert on this, Heather. On the opportunities for special educational needs, you talked about the rise in numbers. You would think that in theory, if we have falling school numbers and if the budgets fell less fast than the number of students, you would have more opportunity to solve some of those special educational needs problems which we are all facing. There is a White Paper out now, as you know, and there is a Bill coming to Parliament soon. I would really like to hear from you about the opportunities—sorry that this has taken a bit long.
I will just say one more thing to give you an example. I worked in Louisiana for a while after Hurricane Katrina, and there was a rural school that was terrible—any data you looked at was terrible. But it was the only school in that place, and the parents loved it. Louisiana wanted to close it down, so they brought in a charter operator from New York and said, “Could you turn this around?” They said, “Yes”. The charter operator then talked to the parents and the parents said, “No, we like our school as it is. We don’t want to change it”, even though on any data progression it was awful. So the charter provider did something rather brilliant. It got a plane and flew the parents from rural Louisiana to New York City and said, “This is what we do in schools like this”, and then the parents said, “Ah! We would like that”. So one of the opportunities may be showing parents what a top-quality school looks like as a way of changing their mindset. But anyway, can you focus on the opportunities for a while? You have already mentioned some.
Yolande Burgess: I think we are all happy to focus on opportunities. Heather, did you want to say something?
Heather Sandy: I agree that there are opportunities when you have capacity within school buildings—that does present opportunities. Again, they are varied across urban and rural areas. SEND is a really key area. The area where we do have children commuting longer than we would like is where they are going to specialist provision, so we are already developing inclusion bases within our mainstream schools where we have that capacity; we look really closely at that. We do really good SEND projection planning and we are able to put specialist resources into classrooms in mainstream schools where they are no longer needed for the mainstream education, and we are able to place children there so that they stay closer to their communities and have that provision. We are getting some really good feedback on that. Obviously that is part of the White Paper work, to encourage more and more schools to be able to develop that provision within their school.
We are also looking at how you target your school infrastructure to do lots of different family-facing services. We have been working with the Department for Education around community use and having community provision within the schools. There are some challenges to that; it requires some capital expenditure because it needs a different entrance, for example—they cannot be mixing with the children—but there are opportunities there, without a shadow of a doubt.
We have also seen really good examples where multi-academy trusts which were leasing buildings for their headquarters are able to move their headquarters into the school and be closer to their own provision. That is reaping benefits as well. It reduces costs for the multi-academy trust and allows it to be closer to that provision. The same applies to teaching schools as well.
As we move forward with the SEND reforms, when you think about experts at hand and about all that provision we are going to be wrapping around our mainstream schools, those capacity spaces within our schools will be able to be utilised for that, which allows us to protect the smaller mainstream provision.
One of the things that we have to be really clear about as we are doing that is to ask how long that space will be free, and to make sure that this is not a dip but permanent. We need to make sure that we are clear about whether we need a SEND inclusion hub in that area. All the demographic planning is really complex.
One of the things I would say is that it is not spotting pupil number decline that is a challenge for us, but being really sophisticated at what that means and what the best thing to do with that space is so that we do not jeopardise a school.
I would just say on your comment around how the money could move with the child straightaway that that would exacerbate the problems with a falling pupil roll, because they have already employed the teacher and they cannot remove the teacher straightaway. It is about thinking about how we support them in the year after and transition them to having a specialist hub, because sometimes the financial impact hits before the strategic solution kicks in.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I was not particularly advocating that; I was just thinking whether you could change the money flow in some way so it would be helpful. That is a good point, though.
Yolande Burgess: Directly linked to that, what both Heather and Steve have pointed out is for us to be more flexible and adaptable—and having a funding system that can help us be more flexible and adaptable would be good. Heather has already mentioned the opportunities with respect to special educational needs and inclusion. That is obviously something that we will all be giving some thought to, particularly thinking about the White Paper. But again, sticking to some of the realistic points that Heather made, all these things have other consequences as well. So, is the workforce right in terms of putting in ARP or ERP into a school, et cetera? We have to think about those things too.
There are other system opportunities as well. The Department for Education school-based nursery investment potentially offers some other opportunities.
Going particularly to your point around how, when you are thinking about community work, it can be genuinely quite difficult to get partners to want to work with schools because there are absolutely safeguarding issues, et cetera—although I know that people are looking at these things—we are going to publish some research in August. I have checked with the team. We have gathered some stories about good practice in what happens when school rolls change, particularly where the local authority works with all its schools, regardless of type, to look at how they look at the whole system. We will get a confidential draft to you to help you with your work. That includes some of the work that Steve has talked about on trust and Heather has talked about on schools. It is particularly in relation to thinking about how it is not just the space itself but about going through that process of thinking about how best you repurpose the space, particularly when you know that it might not be permanent.
The Chair: That would be very helpful, because this inquiry may not last as long as August. It would be good if we could see something in advance of that.
Yolande Burgess: We will get back to you as soon as we can.
Steve Rollett: Just briefly, Government has a decision to make, as always, about the funding element. In a world where—this is the point you made—the decline in pupil numbers is not met to the same extent by a decline in funding, you create additional funding capacity in the system. There are all sorts of things that we can do with that which colleagues have talked about, around SEND and AP community hubs, and we have schools, local authorities and trusts that are already leading the way on that work. So no great impetus is probably needed to do that. The thing that is needed is the funding and the capacity to do it. Fundamentally, one of the things that Government could do in this space, if it wants to benefit from the opportunities that we are talking about now, is to make sure that gap is maintained and we do not see the funding level just shrinking straightaway to match that decline in numbers.
Q9 Lord Mohammed of Tinsley: I have a couple of points. First, just going back to the opportunities, I think Heather might have said that the schools that have the biggest need and which need the most help are the ones that often will struggle. Given that, as we say, the number of young people will decrease because of the birth rates but the opportunity—that is, the money—is still there, is there an argument that those schools that are the most vulnerable and the most needy potentially could have, in addition to the pupil premium that Baroness Coffey talked about, additional top-ups or smaller class sizes? It is something that previous Governments looked at. Is that an opportunity that exists? Secondly, Yolande, you talked about the flexibility of buildings and adaptations. I know that many secondary schools were rebuilt under PFI; I do not know how many smaller schools were. Do you think that if they were, PFI would be a hindrance?
Heather Sandy: On whether the opportunities are there for us to invest more in areas of higher disadvantage, I am sure the department would point at the pupil premium funding and that schools are given an enhanced level of funding for children who are eligible for the pupil premium. I would always advocate that, to genuinely meet the disadvantage gap, we are going to need more. We are seeing that disadvantage gap widening, and we see that, particularly for vulnerable groups of children—children in care, children in child protection, children living in disadvantage—the attainment gap for them is a persistent problem. We also know that, for many of those children, education is the route out.
I think everyone would say we get the pupil premium; I would always advocate that the more we can invest in the most vulnerable children, the less need we will see presenting later. If we do it at primary level, we will see less need presenting later. We need to see that investment in preventive services, not in reactive services once we are in crisis. We need to look across that whole piece around speech and language development, parental support and family help. There is an awful lot happening in that space and it is a really complicated space to articulate very succinctly. A lot is happening. It is about keeping all of that together and keeping schools as part of the response to that. So yes, there are opportunities. Do we need more? Absolutely we need more.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley: Obviously, we have had the Milburn review about NEETs. I am sure that if you look into that, he is not just saying that they want support when they are 16—they need support early on. What about PFI?
Yolande Burgess: Actually, I will not pick up on PFI—that is a hot topic. Instead, I will say this, particularly as we are talking about genuinely thinking about how we manage the structural decline in pupil numbers at the moment. How can we work with the department to get it to help us think about a strategy for when the transition happens?
This is particularly the case for primary schools, because they tend to be smaller, wherever they are. Many have one-form entry. Those financial hits that Steve talked about will happen so much faster than our ability to strategically plan for what we want to do next. We have to work with the department to ask what a strategic plan looks like for the transition.
If, as a last-case scenario, we have to close down a school, how do we make sure that we are not getting rid of the asset? Are there different ways to repurpose the asset? It might also give us a good opportunity to develop more inclusive SEND provision in the school, while making sure that we then develop the capacity as we go. Working with the department on a strategy for the transition would help.
Coming back to the resource point that Heather made, we would then need to think about what that looks like financially. In some instances, what would the capital options need to look like?
Heather Sandy: Those are really good points. Again, it comes back to the levers problem. Individual schools make individual decisions for the cohort of children they have, which is absolutely right. Local authorities plan for the cohort of children in the local area. If we see a need for a nursery or for SEND provision, we have to persuade the school to do that. We cannot direct. There are opportunities there.
I am not saying that that is wrong, but it is another barrier in the system. Where we have really good relationships with the trusts, they can be responsive to that, but it is a challenge. Sometimes, if you are planning for your school, you might not think that they are opportunities that you need to provide. If you are planning for the local area, you know that you need that provision in that area—and that is the school with the space. But we do not have the levers to do it.
That comes back to the conversation about, “Am I thinking about my child or am I thinking about all children?” Parents understandably think about their child. In a system, we have to think about all children. We have a system that puts legal responsibility on school leaders and trusts to think about their children in their school and their trust, but not the whole area. That means that they can exclude or they can encourage children. We see really good practice. Some of our schools and trusts are the most inclusive providers within the area. But if you are the school that has the capacity, you are the school that will end up with those children. It comes back to the point that was made earlier: you are hit by the vulnerability on each occasion.
Yolande Burgess: To come back to Baroness Coffey’s point about the Act being in its early days, to a huge extent it will rely on implementation—and, potentially, enforcement where it is required. That will require a lot of work between local authorities and the department to make sure it works in the right way.
Steve Rollett: I just want to come back to class sizes, which you mentioned in particular. I certainly do not want to be in a position of saying that we want really big class sizes and that that is a solution to this. I would caution against us imagining a world where, if we did have the additional resource in the system that you were talking about, we would necessarily think that the right tactical move for us across the system is to reduce class sizes and that it would automatically bring about improvements for the disadvantaged children you are rightly concerned about.
When you look at the available evidence on class sizes and the impact of class sizes on achievement, it is quite mixed. There is no clear evidence base that says, for example, if you reduce class sizes from 30 to 25, the children will do better.
When we talk about disadvantaged children, we are not just thinking about them being economically disadvantaged; the effect of their economic or social disadvantage often means that they are behind their peers in achievement. What is needed to bridge that gap is the highest quality teaching and learning. That is what all the evidence bears out. If there were additional money in the system—I do not want to say “a windfall”—to bridge the gap that you were talking about, we would have to think carefully about where we invest it. We need training for teachers, including high-quality CPD. We also need to help our leaders navigate their way through these challenges, so that they make sure—I think this is where we are getting to—that this is not only about balancing budgets and finances but about putting quality first. I think we could support that aim with some additional money, if it is available.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I have a very simple point. I am really interested in how are describing this; it is very insightful. I wondered whether any of you now is thinking ahead to planning for the secondary impact of this demographic decline as it goes through secondary schools. This seems like an opportunity to learn from what you have just experienced and to plan ahead for secondary.
Steve Rollett: The short answer is that I do not think I am doing a huge amount of planning for that in the work we are doing with our members. That speaks to one of the background challenges that Yolande talked about earlier. We have seen a huge increase in need in the system. We have long-standing budgetary constraints. We also have a very significant reform agenda working through the system. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of school leaders—they are often dealing with what they see in front of them here and now.
I will take your challenge away, because I like it, and I think there is more that we can do with our members to think about what this would look like for secondary. My hunch is that it will be different in some ways. Heather talked about this earlier. I suspect that some of the impact on educational quality will be seen in the curriculum. We see some of that already, where schools in the system—for whatever reason, whether it is a poor Ofsted judgment or changes in parental preference—have seen a decline in pupil numbers, and it has made it harder to maintain rich curriculum provision. For GCSEs, for example, running as many options and preferences for children can be harder in a school that is in decline. So my sense is that there are probably some lessons out there already that the secondary sector can draw on. It is a good challenge, and I will take it away.
Heather Sandy: Local authorities are planning ahead, looking at that and projecting where the vulnerabilities will hit. Exactly as has just been said, the vulnerabilities will hit the schools that are lowest in terms of parental preference, because everyone will shuffle up and those schools will move back. We encourage schools to do curriculum modelling and to think about who they are working with, such as whether they are part of a trust. We work with trusts as well. Local authorities are doing those projections and working with schools that we think might need to consider this as we move forward.
Steve Rollett: Can I just clarify something? I think you are right, Heather. I was not suggesting that schools are not doing that thinking—I believe that they are within the constraints of the situation that I talked about. In particular, it is probably worth looking at integrated curriculum financial planning, which is long-standing in the secondary sector. But, again, it speaks to the fact that holding the finances and curriculum provision are linked.
Q10 Baroness Pidgeon: This has been a really interesting discussion. You have all been talking about the different roles of schools, local authorities and, to a lesser extent, the Government in how you plan pupil places. Do you think that all the powers, duties and processes currently in place, and everyone’s role in them, are clear? Given the Government’s new Act and White Paper, is more guidance—or something else—needed to make sure that the Government’s plans are implemented in your different ways?
Yolande Burgess: I have worked really closely with the department, and these are discussions that we have already had. The department needs to create a framework around falling school rolls by getting a sense of surplus capacity, reasonableness and so on. It also needs bring together learnings from across the country. It was interesting that the three of us could have a quick chat outside of the room and share some examples. We need to start to build an evidence base of what is possible and what we can do. Even though our regional areas are different, we will still have schools that look quite similar, regardless of whether they are rural or urban. That would be really helpful.
We touched on in-year admissions; the department needs to look at them, particularly in relation to what can be done about falling school rolls. That would be helpful.
We have talked about the Act, which will also be useful. It will be critical to make sure that we have good lines of communication with the department, so that it is enacted properly.
A huge opportunity space is working very closely with the department—particularly now that the local authorities have done their special educational needs plans—on how we think about what we want to do there to build capacity and inclusion right across mainstream, and how we can use some of that work to think about how we manage surplus capacity. We can then start not only to think about the tale of decline in secondary but also literally to think forward 10, 20 or 25 years about what happens when it starts to go back up. It is about getting into that strong strategic space, but we cannot do that without the Government.
Baroness Pidgeon: Are you saying that historically, in London, the boroughs’ data is very accurate? I know that their pupil planning was very good 20 years ago, but is it still?
Yolande Burgess: Looking at the last decade, the issues we have had would have been very difficult to genuinely think about: first, Covid and, secondly, Brexit. Certain things had an impact that was hugely unpredictable. We all touched on the wealth of data that boroughs look at for projections. Some of that data is now hitting higher levels of variability: inward migration, outward migration and those sorts of things. So, while every area works really hard to make sure that their projections are as accurate as possible, almost one bucket of space that we need to think about collectively is: how do we get better data sharing? How do we make sure that that data is better? We need to do some of that forward planning better together.
Heather Sandy: I definitely echo that. The forecasting is really complex, as I have said. You have birth rates, housing trajectories, migration, elective home education, SEND trends and transport challenges. The DfE has done a really good job on its scorecard, which is a helpful tool, and the national projections are helpful. But the impact of those projections is different in Stamford from the impact in Skegness. So the challenge is that we need to have really robust provision and ownership in local areas around that.
We will potentially come on to local government reform and protecting that capacity for place planning. We have a robust and proven way of trajectory planning within Lincolnshire, but that is not consistent nationally and some people have not had to think about it as much—that is the reality. So we need to make sure that we continue to support that expertise in the system as we move forward, because that will be really important.
Baroness Pidgeon: Are there other levers that would help with all this? You talked about your frustrations earlier. You work well with partners, and I know it is all about those relationships, but is there something else that would help you with this?
Heather Sandy: There are levers, and some of them are coming through in the Bill. We need to see their impact and evaluate it. We need to be able to place plan strategically. I always say this, but the vast majority of schools and academies work with us to do that—across the country, not just in Lincolnshire. But we need to be able to align admission numbers, capacity decisions and estate planning across maintained schools, academies and trusts so that we can maximise the school estate for the children that we have and make sure that we are getting the very best. It is a public service, and we need to make sure that we are delivering in that way. We have all the statutory duties around that, but we do not have all the decision-making tools. It is about making sure that those align.
For me, this goes back to a really good point Steve made around flexibility and funding. What we need to do is not force short-term decisions that have long-term consequences that are detrimental to the school system. We need the flexibility, through a government framework, that allows us to take the time to use that capacity wisely, get the staffing ready and support the schools to transition to that so that we can make that provision the very best it can be. So, for me, it is the levers and then it is the flexibility to support schools to lead that journey for us.
In some of these communities, schools are the last public building open, so we really need to think about how we use them, how we move forward and how we support them. As Yolande said, we need to be able to grow them.
Yolande Burgess: It is about making the system more resilient, not smaller.
Baroness Pidgeon: That is a good way of putting it. Steve, do you have anything to add? Is there any other support that you could do with receiving from the department?
Steve Rollett: I largely echo what colleagues said. You talked about levers, and there are levers in the Act. As colleagues have said—and I agree—we need to see how those bed in and how they work. A really important amendment was made around the adjudicator, which means that the adjudicator has to seek a view from the DfE, effectively, around quality. I recognise the push from Heather and Yolande around local authorities’ responsibility for sufficiency, but that has to be about quality as well. I am not saying that colleagues are not cognisant of that, but that amendment helps to embed that in the Act, which is a good thing.
Partnerships are really important. One thing we know about this—we have talked about it at length today—is that, although to some degree this is a national challenge because we are starting to see it happen everywhere, how it feels is very different in different places. Yolande rightly made the point that, in some pockets of the country, we have increased numbers of people, rather than decreases. From the DfE’s perspective, that means that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution from the centre that it can or should create to solve this issue. What it can do is provide leadership through a framework or establishing particular principles that local authorities, schools and trusts can come together around—best practice work and so on
There probably is more that it can do, and it is about finding that balance. Yes, there is more that the DfE can do from the centre without it being a decision imposed from the centre—that comes back to the points about flexibility that others have made. I think you would find local authorities, and certainly members of mine, that would be really appreciative of that support.
Baroness Pidgeon: Has the DfE woken up to the fact that numbers are falling in some places? We heard from the National Audit Office that, until very recently, the risk register in the department was all about not having enough places rather than the dual challenge you have described today.
Steve Rollett: That is certainly my sense.
Yolande Burgess: I think it does understand the headline demographic drop. We talked about frameworks and starting to corral that good practice. It is not fully cognisant of the operational and educational impacts and consequences within a local system. I know that the NAO picked that up, and that is the area where working together with the department would help.
Heather Sandy: The thing I would add, which I am sure you would expect, is that we would not want it to be London-centric. Since it hit London, it has got a lot of coverage but, actually, what works on paper often does not work in urban areas. Flexibility will be really important, and we would like some rural protections in there. We would like to see some protections that really consider what happens when it will have a community impact and when there is a lack of alternatives when they hit on the transport Bill—really focusing on quality, of course. In order to have that quality, you need the flexibility to fund those rural schools differently when their numbers are falling so that they can keep that curriculum provision. For me, it is about making sure that it is not urban-centric or London-centric but recognises rurality and the additional challenges that that brings for falling pupil rolls.
Steve Rollett: The solution—where the DfE can find solutions—is about making sure that this issue is not siloed. How this is experienced in a school setting is not, “Here’s a set of issues created by falling rolls and here’s a set of issues created by other budgetary constraints or staffing issues: long-standing teacher recruitment issues and so on”. They feel all that together. It is important, in creating frameworks and so on, that the DfE is really cognisant of how it needs to try to hold that stuff together and create coherence for people, particularly through this huge set of reforms that will be working through the system. That is not to say that they are the wrong reforms—things such as the SEND reform that we talked about earlier are really important—but they speak to a need for the DfE to hold those things together really clearly in policy terms.
Q11 Baroness Hollins: I should mention an interest: I founded and chair a charity called Books Beyond Words, which does some work with primary schools in South Yorkshire. I used to be a child psychiatrist, so I am particularly interested in additional needs: learning disabilities, autism and mental health needs, as well as children who have had adverse childhood experiences, particularly those who are excluded because of behavioural challenges. The families, of course, have to home school or try to provide alternative provision. I am also thinking about the long-term outcomes.
In that context, I just do not want us to forget—you have talked about it, but perhaps not referred to it specifically—some of the particular challenges of the children.
I want to ask you what further reforms you think might be needed. In many ways, they have been covered. Steve, you made a very clear statement that we need a government decision on the funding formula and, Heather, you made some comments about the importance of a more flexible governance framework and rural protections, but what other reforms do you think we need that we have not touched on?
Heather Sandy: The Bill is giving us stronger powers around place-based co-ordination. The challenges are in that in-between stage, where we have not yet seen the impact of the changes that the department has brought in. We are really hopeful that they will help where we need it, in certain areas around place-based co-ordination.
Some areas that we think are important are transitional funding, where we have falling rolls, and a stronger estate strategy, so that we can be really clear about reuse—repurpose—not disposal. We need to have powers around capacity to do that strategically and not just to keep the schools that have parental preference open all the time. There are all kinds of complexities within that and I acknowledge that.
I have talked about rural protection, so I will not talk about that. On better integrated forecasting, the tools we have are good, but we can go further. Then, for me, the protection and safeguards for local government reform will be really important. We are changing the definition of “place”, so place planning will become different again. We have built up relationships; we talk about how fantastically well academies and schools work with us, and we are going to have new leaders in councils and schools in new areas. Recognising that that is happening, as we do social care reforms and SEND reforms, and as we have falling pupil rolls and local government reform, will be really important. That stability and protection will be really important.
Yolande Burgess: Leaning into that, a huge wave of reform is happening in just children’s services alone. We are thinking about working with the department to look at that in the round and how we use all those reforms as opportunities, when we are thinking about one specific problem.
On your earlier point, Baroness Hollins, about children’s specific needs, we believe that the White Paper’s direction on special educational needs is absolutely right. But I will not fib: we are all a bit anxious that, on the information on experts at hand, it takes four years for an educational psychologist to fully qualify. We know that we do not have sufficient numbers of speech and language therapists and so on so, alongside looking at all the reforms together, we need to think about phasing and staging as well. How do we get the reforms to land in the right way, so that we are again building resilience into the system and not ending up in a situation where we are taking very limited capacity from one reform to another but are looking at them in the round?
Steve Rollett: I want to build on the point that Yolande just made around resilience. That is just very important. There is a growing sense of partnership and collaboration in the system. The tone that the Government have set on that has been really welcome, but it is not just the Government leading that; it has been happening on the ground for a long time anyway, in places. Particularly post Covid, there has been a renewed sense that, even in areas where partnership working is not strong, we do need to do that and that resilience is really important.
What sets this issue apart from many others in the education system, but particularly this one, is that no school is going to solve it on its own. That is the thread that runs through everything that we have said: this is going to be solved by schools and local authorities working together.
Going back to the earlier example I gave of Grace Schools, I do not want to be the person who says that the answer to this is schools being in a multi-academy trust and that that will solve all the issues. That is not what I am saying. But creating system resilience in that way has been beneficial for some schools. It is not the solution, but making sure that we have that is definitely an important part of the solution. It brings flexibility and the additional leadership resource that I was talking about earlier. Against a very challenging financial backdrop in the trust sector, we are seeing that trusts are holding up and multi-academy trusts are probably holding up better than others in the system.
Heather Sandy: We want to make sure that those trusts are incentivised and engaged in taking the small rural schools with falling numbers, which is a challenge. We need to recognise that, if trusts work with one of these schools, it is a financial risk to them. We very often do not get trust sponsors coming forward for these schools. There are benefits to be had, but we do not always see the options there for some of these schools. Before we even consider closure, we would look at whether we could get a trust to work with us, and it is important to say that. How we incentivise trusts and recognise the risks that they are taking on is really important.
Steve Rollett: That is a really important point, particularly in the context of things like the conversion grant having disappeared recently. Trusts do have to think very carefully about risk; it is absolutely right that they do. What can we do to mitigate some of the risk that taking on some of these vulnerable schools might mean for them?
The Chair: That was an excellent point to end on. I thank all three of you so much for your insights and your very open and explicit contribution to our inquiry. It is much appreciated, and I am very pleased that it has at least brought you three together to talk to each other. That should be an exemplar across the country.
