WBC’s submission Local Plan (p. 35) provides for 11,968 new dwellings over the plan period 2024-2040. But will there be enough school places to cope with the children living in them?
Residents of the Western parishes already know all too well that local educational provision is bursting at the seams, with some parents forced to drive halfway across the borough four times a day, just so their child can get educated. Other children may or may not manage to get a seat on a school bus provided by the Council.
Does the LPU offer relief from this growing crisis in Wokingham’s education system?
School places: facts and figures
The Department for Education gives figures for average pupil yields per so many new dwelling, and for average school sizes in England as of 2022/23. Using this information, the government says the typical demand that new homes will create is as follows:-
• one average sized primary school per 1,104 new homes
• one average sized secondary school per 8,107 new homes
Wokingham Council’s Local Plan (p. 72, p. 80) provides for three new primary schools and one new secondary. One of the primary schools is to be located at Arborfield Green, the other three schools at Hall Farm.
Evidently, they will nowhere near suffice for the numbers of children to be expected. On the government’s figures, there will be a shortfall of nearly 4,000 secondary and about 8,600 primary places.
Such a huge discrepancy is very hard to credit. Is it that WBC’s planners are expecting some fairly gigantic schools to be built? Or do they just not reckon they need to follow what government says?
Falling rolls?
It’s true that the numbers of primary and secondary-age children are expected to fall between 2023 and 2040 nationally, due to declining birth rates. But the percentage of affordable homes in the Local Plan has been increased to 40% of new dwellings, and affordable homes tend to have more young families with children. So that may at least in part cancel out the declining birth rate factor.
Emmbrook and Bohunt are secondary schools within the Borough’s southern catchment area.
There’s another factor that’s going to keep demand for school places high for some time. In a recent survey of education provision in the Borough, ‘Wokingham Borough School Places Strategy 2024/25 to 2029/30’, WBC reports that post-2021 ‘there has been a significant increase in international migration of children into the Borough. Much of this is due to increased numbers of British Nationals (Overseas), from Hong Kong.’ WBC says that numbers of additional primary age children per year have more than doubled. (Secondary school rolls have also increased, as was reported on this blog in March of last year.) As a result, the high migrant numbers from 2021 onwards are said to be at least balancing the impact of falling birth numbers on school rolls.
Black spots
The WBC report identifies an area of the Borough which has a projected ‘deficit in school places across all Key Stages’. No prizes for guessing where: it’s the Shinfield, Arborfield, Barkham, Swallowfield and Arborfield Garrison SDL areas. The Shinfield area in particular, the Council admits, ‘is seeing the highest rate of growth and is the area with immediate capacity issues’.
The report provides this graph to show the Shinfield area primary school roll total as against current capacity (1,500 school places):-
Next year they project a shortfall of about 30 places, and by 2027/28 they tell us there would be over 250 primary-age children without a school to go to, unless something is done. What are they planning to do? They talk about a new school on a site in Spencers Wood by September 2026, all being well. If planning restrictions on building on that site in the AWE evacuation zone can be overcome, that is. We’ll see.
Problem solved?
The Council’s education strategy report paints a grim picture that will be only too familiar to parents living in the education black spots. Shinfield’s secondary school, Oakbank, admits only about 120 pupils a year. Local primary schools currently admit 210 pupils. Alternative schools are not within walking distance, the report notes.
The Council planners give up at this point, saying ‘there are no immediate local solutions’. (They mean solutions to a problem they themselves created by grossly overdeveloping the Shinfield area over the last ten years, of course.) Then they spot a light on the horizon. One solution, they say ‘may become available in conjunction with the proposed Loddon Valley Garden Village (Hall Farm)’. But as we just saw, the schools included in the Hall Farm housing scheme won’t even suffice for the new population the scheme itself would create. To imagine it would in any way help to solve the existing schools crisis in our area is ridiculous.
So when they talk about a new secondary school built on Hall Farm as if it's going to help solve the schools crisis, who do the Council planners think they’re kidding?
Their Local Plan makes the crisis worse.
Pat Phillipps
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