Wednesday 22 January 2020 | UK News feed
No primary school places for hundreds
Hundreds of young children have been left without a school place this year after a surge in applications for the best primary schools.
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
9:30PM BST 01 May 2008
In some local authorities, more than 200 four and five-year-olds have yet to secure a place for September. Many more have been forced to accept second, third or fourth choices, it is claimed.
The crisis – concentrated in London and the South East – has been blamed by experts on the credit crisis, which is reducing demand for fee-paying schools, and an increase in immigrants moving into some areas.
Yesterday, parents said they were considering suing local authorities amid fears they may be forced to pay to educate children privately.
Other counties across the Midlands and the North also reported that more parents failed to get children into their first-choice secondary school.
Margaret Morrissey, a spokesman for the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: "We have got into a really terrible state with education in this country. In the last few years pupil numbers have gone down so the Government's easy answer has been to shut primary schools.
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"Now what's happening? The birth rate is beginning to go back up and you have got large numbers of immigrants moving into some areas, meaning parents cannot get into their local school."
In Kingston upon Thames, south-west London, almost a quarter of children were denied their first-choice school and around 200 are currently without any place at all. There are 258 pupils without a place in nearby Merton, 158 in Richmond and 88 in Sutton.
A Kingston council spokesman said: "The demand for places has exceeded the projected need based on the usual indicators, such as increased birth rate and local housing developments. There is evidence of a similar trend right across south-west London."
Vicky Grinnell-Wright, 33, a consultant from Kingston, said she was facing "crippling" private school fees for her four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, if the council failed to expand local primary schools.
"If the council is welcoming people from outside the borough, building houses and flats and letting people sub-divide houses into flats, it has a duty to increase the facilities available to service these people," she said.
The scramble for primary school places mirrors the increased demand in recent years for the best state secondary schools. Official figures showed that almost one in five pupils failed to get a place at their first-choice secondary this year.
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