The truth no one will admit about why Britain’s primary schools are bursting at the seams
Classes of 70, four-year-olds forced to commute for three hours, a roof turned into a playground . . .
‘My little girl will just be a face
in the crowd’
quences — is to be found than at Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, East London, a borough that has seen a 60 per cent rise in the birth rate and a doubling of the foreign- born population in the past decade.
To cope with demand, in the past six years the school has had to create 13 new classrooms after pupil numbers soared by 50 per cent from 800 to 1,200.
Eight mobile classrooms have been placed in the playground, with a further five permanently built. One of these is placed on ‘stilts’ above the main entrance to save space.
The primary, the biggest in the country, has lost all its playing fields and at times has had to sacrifice its music-room and library for extra teaching space.
The latest casualty is the school’s IT suite, which has had to make way for an extra dining room to accommodate Nick Clegg’s new free school meals initiative for pupils under seven. The 1,200 children are split into 39 classes, and the school, which has 150 staff, runs with military precision on a rota of lunchtimes, lessons and play.
There are three assemblies a day — two in the morning and one after lunch — because the children cannot all fit into the school hall at once.
As for the playground, it is rationed into six shifts, while lunchtime is staggered from 11.45am to 1.20pm.
Sixty different languages are spoken at Gascoigne and more than 90 per cent of pupils have English as an additional language.
One third are Eastern European and a third are African.
‘I’m not going to pretend there aren’t difficulties, but you have to overcome them,’ admits headteacher Bob Barton, 61. ‘There is no doubt that we are overcrowded. There is no way we can take any more children.’
And it is not just London schools that are being forced to squeeze extra pupils in any way they can. At Birkdale Primary School in Southport, Merseyside, architects recently designed a play- deck on the extended roof of the 378-pupil school due to a lack of space.
And there are plans for Bristol Cathedral Choir Primary School, the city’s most over- subscribed primary, to move from its temporary base into several unused floors at the city’s central library.
That mirrors steps taken in Brighton, East Sussex, where the former Hove police station has been converted into a satellite school to accommodate 500 pupils.
For parents, of course, the main worry is that as more and more children are packed into ever-larger schools, their offspring’s education and well-being will suffer.
A survey this week by online parenting forum Netmums found that one in five parents think schools are squeezing too many children into classes.
Similar numbers told of their unease that their child might get ‘lost’ in the school system and not get the individual attention they needed.
It is a fear shared by 37-year-old Sarah Irving, whose four-year- old son Joshua will start school next month.
She and partner Ed Laptalis were confident their boy would go to their local primary school in the village of Langley, Berkshire. Indeed, to ensure this happened, last year they bought a house threequarters of a mile from the school, which they believed would be well within its catchment area.
But this April they learned that due to exceptional demand, the catchment boundary had been moved and they had missed out by a couple of hundred metres.
Instead, the council informed them that their son had been allocated a place at another school a mile-and-a-half away — one with 180 children, or six classes of 30, starting in reception.
‘We were gutted,’ said Sarah, a manager at B&Q. ‘I’m very worried about the size of the school he is now going to have to go to — it is a very large school.
‘Joshua doesn’t like change and is quite shy with people he doesn’t know. I’m worried whether he will be able to settle in.’
It is a point echoed by Annette Davidson. She, too, failed to get her daughter, Melissa, four, into the local school she wanted.
‘There were 126 applicants for just 30 places,’ said Annette, who lives in Ashton-Under-Lyne and runs an online gift business with husband Gary. ‘Of those, 13 places went to siblings, and due to the distance we live from the school we failed to qualify for the remainder.’
Instead, she was offered a place at another local primary school, which she subsequently discovered was doubling its intake at reception from 30 to 60 at the start of this school year. While the children will have two teachers, parents have been told by the school that for much of the time they will be treated as a single group.
‘I was pretty shocked,’ said Annette. ‘In my daughter’s nursery she was in a class of just 15. So to go from 15 to what is effectively 60 is a lot for her to cope with. I’m worried that she will become just a face in the crowd, a number rather than a name.
‘We’ve been trying to be upbeat about the new term, telling her it will be a big adventure, but I would definitely rather she was in a smaller class. Unfortunately, it seems we don’t have any choice, and I know there are other parents who feel the same.’
And, ultimately, that goes to the nub of the problem.
Because while the Government may claim that it is giving unprecedented sums of money to councils to cope with growing demand (£5 billion over the course of this Parliament), on the ground, parents simply cannot understand why more was not done sooner to cope with an entirely predictable problem.
Nor why four- year- old Olivia, and tens of thousands of children like her, can’t begin their school life at their local school — and in primaries that are nurturing, rather than plain enormous.