People leading schools in this country today face a simple and brutal reality...
They rely on children coming to their school for the money they require to pay the bills and their staff.
But the number of children needing school places has collapsed over the past decade and is likely to remain low for years to come.
Schools that are now struggling to fill their classrooms are not struggling because of a temporary local anomaly that will magically correct itself.
They are struggling because of a fundamental demographic change in England and Wales.
This fundamental change is a fall in the birth rate of 19 per cent, with 138,602 fewer children born in 2023 than in 2012.
If this doesn't feel significant, then another way of looking at it is that it is the equivalent of 2,310 two-form-entry primary schools that we will no longer need.
Why has all of this happened?
Developed nations have historically seen falls in birth rates during times of economic crisis (the opposite is true in developing nations, where having children is seen as being supportive of the family unit in hard times) and the past ten to 15 years have certainly featured their fair share of economic crises.
In fact, it has just been one big problem after another.
In this country, people started to have fewer children as recession bit following the 2008 financial crash.
Falls in the birth rate continued as UK government austerity policies from 2010 onwards saw the removal of financial and practical support mechanisms for having children.
Then, in 2016, we voted to leave the EU.
The Brexit double whammy prolonged economic uncertainty for the general population and also, on a practical level, led to the departure of large numbers of young Europeans who either had children or would have soon had children here in the UK.
Soon afterwards, Covid hit and devastated the global economy.
Then, just as European economies were starting to recover, Putin's invasion of Ukraine created a cost of living crisis.
In the UK, the situation was made worse by the calamitous mini budget that led to the resignation of Liz Truss as PM.
One big problem after another!
The birth rate crisis is worse in some areas of England & Wales than in others.
In the most affluent areas, where young families are priced out of the housing market, it is particularly severe.
Brighton, for example, has seen a fall in the birth rate of 33 per cent, and primary schools are shutting as a result.
The same thing is happening is certain boroughs of London (not just in affluent areas of the capital, but also in more deprived area where there were large economic migrant communities pre-Brexit).
But even in areas where birth rates have been relatively stable – area
Obviously, the maths isn't as simple as 19 per cent of schools having to shut across England & Wales because demand for places will fall 19 per cent.
But it is inevitable that school closures will follow elsewhere.
The statistic that perhaps illustrates best the extent of the demographic change is the TFR (Total Fertility Rate).
The TFR is the number of children that the average woman could expect to have by the end of her childbearing years if the current economic and social conditions were to persist.
At the start of the 1970s, the TFR in the UK was 2.4 – and '2.4 children' became widely used as a descriptor of stereotypical family life (as well as being the title of a so-so 1990s BBC sitcom).
Over the subsequent four decades of social change and fluctuating economic conditions, the TFR in England and Wales edged downwards, until it stood at at 1.94 in 2012.
Since then, it has plummeted.
In 2023, the TFR in England and Wales was 1.44.
This is not far off the figure in Japan (1.26 in 2022), where low fertility rates have long been identified as being a major threat to the country's ability to sustainably provide for an ageing population.
In demographic terms, we are clearly living in a fundamentally different country to the one we were living in just a decade or so ago.
In the lo
Comments