Place planning is a statutory duty of local authorities. Quite simply it means managing the number of school places within its area, both ensuring that there are sufficient for the number of children locally, and reducing them as populations change. Since the 2012 Education Act this has become considerably harder as responsibility for opening schools now sits with Regional Commissioners, and these can only be free schools or academies, no more local authority maintained schools. Similarly, councils can’t close academies. Only the Department for Education can, through Regional Commissioners.
Councils have responsibilities without the powers to fulfil them.
In December last year Hackney council decided to close or merge six of its primary schools due to falling rolls, even though not all of these schools were in the places most affected by falling numbers. They just couldn’t touch the academies, even though they too were affected.
And in August this year Islington Council lost a judicial review of an academy order imposed after an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted inspection. Within the borough the school, Pooles Park, is the one most affected by falling rolls, so is logically the one that needs to close. However, because the academy order cannot be overturned it will now stay open, and another one – a local authority maintained school - will have to close. Despite every other primary school locally being judged either ‘Good,’ or ‘Outstanding.’
Whilst this judgement seems anomalous, there are plenty of instances of schools choosing to academise in order to protect themselves from closure, with Schools Week reporting in February that the Diocese of Westminster was encouraging Catholic schools to do so in order to protect themselves.
The upshot of all this is that local authorities have a responsibility they are severely restricted in fulfilling by regulations designed to limit their control of schools and to expand the academies sector. Schools that are not needed stay open. Schools that fulfil an essential purpose in a neighbourhood are forced to close. Or academise to prevent closure. Meaning another school has to be closed. Or choose to academise. And so on. These are regulations blatantly designed to promote a stalled political project.
The academies system is wasteful, unaccountable to local people, and ideologically driven. A first step to ending this situation would be for the government to return to local authorities the rights necessary to fulfil their place planning responsibilities and effectively manage the resources their residents need. It would also mean that Regional Commissioners could be got rid of. And schools could no longer game the system.