| SPOTLIGHT |
The legal duty of councils to ensure every child has access to a school place could be undeliverable unless councils are given back powers to open new maintained schools or are able to compel academies to expand, the Local Government Association has warned.
The warning was issued in the week that children receive their secondary school placement offers.
The LGA said councils should remain at the heart of school place planning. It expressed a fear that “without academies – which now make up over 60% of secondary schools – agreeing to increase capacity, and without the ability to open new maintained schools in areas of need, the ability to provide enough school places could be put at risk”.
The Association also claimed that councils might struggle to find free school sponsors to open schools in time within their areas as the programme develops.
Councils are under a duty to plan for a 20% increase in secondary school students by 2024. Some 3,287,000 secondary school places will be needed in 2024, compared to 2,740,000 in 2015, according to official figures.
Cllr Roy Perry, Chairman of the LGA's Children and Young People Board, said: "Councils have a statutory duty to ensure every child has a school place available to them but find themselves in the difficult position of not being able to ensure schools, including academies, expand. Finding suitable sponsors with the capacity to take on the running of a successful new school is also proving a challenge.
"Councils have already created an extra 300,000 primary places, but those children will soon need to move up to secondary schools. Councils will do everything they can to rise to the challenge of ensuring no child goes without a place, but all schools must play their part too. If academies are not willing to expand, then powers to create new schools should be returned to local authorities themselves if they are unable to secure high quality free school sponsors in their communities."
The LGA also called for funding allocations to be provided in five-year blocks to allow councils to work with local schools to financially plan long-term.
