Inner London's Schools Are Running Out of Children
Expect more school closures in the next few years
In May 2023 the pupils and their parents at St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls in Tulse Hill, south London received some bad news: their school announced it planned to close.
It was the second school in the London Borough of Lambeth to announce its closure in as many months. In April Archbishop Tenison’s School by the Oval cricket ground also said it was shutting its doors.
St Martin’s was founded in 1699 and Archbishop Tenison’s in 1685. Both schools have the Industrial Revolution, Queen Victoria, the World Wars and 9/11 come and go.
Why are they now closing?
Emptying classrooms in Inner London
The simple answer is that these schools no longer have enough children to keep them open. Schools need pupils to remain viable. Fewer pupils means less funding but many of a school’s fixed costs remain similar regardless of how many pupils are enrolled. It costs the same amount to heat a classroom regardless of how many pupils sit at the desks. Eventually mergers or closures become inevitable.
St Martin’s issued a statement that said declining pupil numbers was the reason the school could not remain open.
There has been a significant decline in the number of young people living and going to school in Lambeth, meaning that we, along with other local schools, have seen our student numbers diminish in recent years. The number of pupils in Lambeth is not expected to increase for approximately eight years. Since funding for schools is awarded based on its pupil numbers, it is no longer viable for St Martin’s to continue operating as a school and deliver the level of education that our young people deserve; the substantive decision has therefore been made to begin the process of closure.
Josephine Okokon, Headteacher [original emphasis]
Pupil numbers in London’s primary schools have been falling for years.
In Lambeth there were 3,236 pupils in reception class in the 2015/16 academic year. Pupils usually start reception class when they are four years old.
Seven years later that number had fallen to 2,672 - a drop of 17.4 per cent.
In Southwark numbers fell 21.4 per cent and in Hackney by 18.4 per cent during this same time frame.
In fact in all 12 boroughs that surround the City of London there were fewer four- and five-year-olds in school in 2022/23 than there were seven years earlier.
Looking at Inner London in more detail, this map shows that about four wards in every five had fewer reception class children in 2022/23 than seven years earlier.
What is causing this decline in pupil numbers?
Falling birth rates
To get a good idea of how many children will enrol in a school, we need to look at the area’s birth rate; in particular, its birth rate from a few years prior.
Birth rates in Inner London boroughs have been falling in the past decade.
The headline measure of a birth rate is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which is the average number of children born to each woman during the course of her lifetime.
For a town, city or country to have a population that naturally holds steady the TFR needs to stand at 2.1. For this reason the figure of 2.1 is sometimes called replacement level fertility. Leaving aside other factors such as migration, wars, pandemics and so on, a place with a TFR of below replacement level will start to see its population’s average age increase and then eventually shrink in size.
Back in 2011 Greenwich was the only borough in Inner London with a TFR of 2.1. All the others had birth rates below the replacement level at that time and since then they have all declined further.
Women in Southwark had 1.77 children on average in 2011. By 2021 this had fallen to just 1.16. This was both one of the steepest declines in England and Wales during this decade and one of the lowest overall rates in the country in 2021.
A fall from 1.77 to 1.16 in Southwark might not sound like much, but it means that on average every 1,000 couples in the borough in 2021 would produce 305 fewer children over the course of their lifetimes than in 2011.
That is equivalent to 10 absent classes of 30 pupils each. This is the effect that is starting to be felt in schools in the capital.
Migration can and does affect the number of children in a particular area. This can be both internal migration, which is the movement of people within a country, and international migration to and from abroad.
A total of 24,563 children aged 0-9 left Inner London for other parts of England and Wales in the year to June 2020. Some 11,938 came the other way, meaning on balance Inner London lost 12,265 children in this age group that year.
In fact Inner London loses people from every age bracket except people in their twenties. The biggest exodus is among people in their thirties. The average age to have their first child is now 30.9 years for women and 33.7 for men, meaning that these thirtysomethings are taking their children with them out of London.
We don’t have the same detailed data for international migration so it’s harder to assess its impact, but it’s reasonable to assume it may bolster class sizes in some areas.
For example, the birth rate in Tower Hamlets fell by 23.8 per cent between 2011 and 2021. Net migration of children was also negative in the latest figures so international migration is the obvious explanation for why the number of children in reception class in Tower Hamlets only fell by 7.4 per cent between 2015/16 and 2022/23.
Expect more school closures in the future
The forecast from the Department for Education is that Inner London boroughs will continue to have fewer primary school pupils in the next few years.
Lambeth is predicted to have 3,815 fewer pupils in its primary schools in 2026/27 compared to the total it had in 2021/22.
All 12 boroughs of Inner London are predicted to have fewer pupils in 2026/27 making a shortfall of 17,000 pupils compared to the 2021/22 academic year
This is equivalent to 21 empty primary schools of 800 pupils each. It’s hard to see how that will lead to anything other than further school closures.
School closures won’t be confined to London
This post has focused on Inner London but these trends are evident in most other parts of England and Wales as well.
York had 13,269 children in primary school in 2021/22. By the time schools start in September 2026 it is forecast to have 11,428.
Other cities forecast to see steep declines in primary school pupils include Plymouth (-12.0 per cent) and Leicester (-11.4 per cent).
In fact, only 26 local authorities in England out of 152 in total are forecast to have more pupils in the September 2026 than they did in September 2021. They are often large county councils such as Cambridgeshire and Essex.
Other countries are grappling with the prospect of school closures as a result of low birth rates.
The Los Angeles Times published a report in May about a headteacher’s successful fight to keep a school open in Cheorwon County, South Korea.
The average South Korean woman gives birth to just 0.78 children during her lifetime -the lowest birth rate in the world. This is causing the country all kinds of challenges, not least how to maintain its armed forces in the face of its hostile neighbour to the north.
The story below could start to be repeated with different names from other parts of the world in the next two decades.
Cheorwon County has one of the highest rates of population flight, as young people leave in search of jobs, better education opportunities or greater access to services such as medical care and public transportation. Officials recently classified it as an “extinction risk.”
Due to its proximity to the Korean demilitarized zone, the county is heavily fortified, and military personnel and their families make up around 60% of the population. In recent years, however, even the military has been moving out.
Since 2018, when the total population was around 47,000, the county has lost about 1,000 people a year.
At a senior center across from Dochang Elementary, a group of grandmothers whose children and grandchildren have all long since left said they worried that closing the school would drain the community of what little vitality remained.
“When else would we see children?” said Ha Su-ja, 79. “I like to listen to the sounds of them playing when the school holds sports day.”
Nationwide, the number of elementary schools in rural areas has dropped from around 5,200 in 1982 to roughly 4,000 today.
Schools, along with hospitals and other public institutions, have overwhelmingly amassed in cities, seeding the very demographic emergency the country now faces. More than half the population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area, where the high cost of living — including education — has discouraged people from having children.