Schools in England could lose up to £1bn in funding by 2030, researchers warn, with exceptional falls in pupil numbers prompting a wave of closures as some establishments cease to be financially viable.
Mergers and closures are already under way in parts of London, where pupil numbers have been falling for some time. According to the Education Policy Institute (EPI), a thinktank, the north-east is projected to see the greatest decline in primary pupil numbers, down 13% by 2028/9.
There are simply fewer children of school age. Therefore fewer school places are required and, presumably, fewer schools.
“The next government must address this grave situation by using the reduction in pupil numbers as an opportunity to improve per-pupil funding – particularly for disadvantaged pupils – rather than as a saving for the Treasury.”
Oooooh, no. That would mean a bureaucracy with a lower than last year budget. Can’t be having with that now, can we?
So, we are heading for an excess capacity opportunity. It’s time to implement vouchers for education and allow parents to choose which school gets their custom. That way, the poorly performing schools will go bust and the better ones will thrive.
Parental choice was always a lie when school places matched numbers of pupils. You had to put up with what The Man was prepared to give you. And rubbish schools could get away with being rubbish.
The Labour government will solve this problem by closing Eton and boosting the roll at Tooting Knife Academy.
A Labour government in hock to the civil service and teachers’ unions isn’t going to be cutting any budget or teacher numbers, they’ll even find a way to increase budgets.
Falling birth-rates are a big problem, and the government’s policy of allowing anyone into the country is obviously not working to alleviate it. Public spaces near me are filled with young men with poor English and wispy beards. Some of them have enthusiastically taken to hassling young women for sex, but too many of them just sit and wistfully gaze at them passing by.
Perhaps we need to give them more money to buy fancy trainers and clothes to attract the fertile ladies? Or perhaps encourage them with a national campaign of advertising and media articles that involves more mixed-race couples?
“According to the Education Policy Institute (EPI), a thinktank, the north-east is projected to see the greatest decline in primary pupil numbers, down 13% by 2028/9.”
That 13% strikes me as being rather on the large side – it’s about 3% per year.
I’d be wondering if it had less to do with falling birth rates, and more with internal migration. It is the North-East, after all.
The Labour government will solve this problem by closing Eton and boosting the roll at Tooting Knife Academy.
I tell you it needs it. When I was at the TKA in the 1980s, there were >1,600 boys there.
They have room for 1,200 but a roll of only 900.
Soon the Old Boys will only occupy one wing at Wandsworth Nick.
@DMcD
That 13% strikes me as being rather on the large side – it’s about 3% per year
Presumably the 13% is a cumulative figure (it’s not indicated as an annual figure) so 3%/year is about right for 2028/29
Soon the Old Boys will only occupy one wing at Wandsworth Nick.
Spare a thought for the dwindling place settings on the OE’s table at Ford Open Prison!
@DMcD
That 13% strikes me as being rather on the large side – it’s about 3% per year
Presumably the 13% is a cumulative figure (it’s not indicated as an annual figure) so 3%/year is about right for 2028/29
My apologies DMcD, having read your post again I think I may have misinterpreted what you said – that 3% /yr is the one on the large size.
We are going to need more Adult Education classes, so displaced teachers can move across and with a bit of DfID funding teach the following:
English Literature especially the King James Bible
English Language
and then for those not behaving
Geography especially the reverse of the route taken by Genghis Khan
If a man won’t fuck, he won’t fight.
Consider how many dickless losers in our society can’t bring themselves to ejaculate inside a woman.
Pathetic.
Be seated.
Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would be killed in a major battle. Every man is scared in his first action. If he says he’s not, he’s a goddamn liar. But the real hero is the man who fights even though he’s scared. Some men will get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour, and for some it takes days. But the real man never lets his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.
All through your army career you men have bitched about what you call ‘this chicken-shit drilling.’ That is all for a purpose—to ensure instant obedience to orders and to create constant alertness. This must be bred into every soldier. I don’t give a fuck for a man who is not always on his toes. But the drilling has made veterans of all you men. You are ready! A man has to be alert all the time if he expects to keep on breathing. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit. There are four hundred neatly marked graves in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on the job—but they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before his officer did.
An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real battle than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we’re going up against.
All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don’t ever let up. Don’t ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn’t like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, ‘Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.’ What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don’t say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.
Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy fighting alongside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies. If not, they will go back home after the war, goddamn cowards, and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we’ll have a nation of brave men.
One of the bravest men I saw in the African campaign was on a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire while we were moving toward Tunis. I stopped and asked him what the hell he was doing up there. He answered, ‘Fixing the wire, sir.’ ‘Isn’t it a little unhealthy up there right now?’ I asked. ‘Yes sir, but this goddamn wire has got to be fixed.’ I asked, ‘Don’t those planes strafing the road bother you?’ And he answered, ‘No sir, but you sure as hell do.’ Now, there was a real soldier. A real man. A man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty appeared at the time.
And you should have seen the trucks on the road to Gabès. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they crawled along those son-of-a-bitch roads, never stopping, never deviating from their course with shells bursting all around them. Many of the men drove over 40 consecutive hours. We got through on good old American guts. These were not combat men. But they were soldiers with a job to do. They were part of a team. Without them the fight would have been lost.
Sure, we all want to go home. We want to get this war over with. But you can’t win a war lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to get the bastards who started it. We want to get the hell over there and clean the goddamn thing up, and then get at those purple-pissing Japs. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. So keep moving. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler.
When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually. The hell with that. My men don’t dig foxholes. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have or ever will have. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.
Some of you men are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken out under fire. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you that you’ll all do your duty. War is a bloody business, a killing business. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them, spill their blood or they will spill yours. Shoot them in the guts. Rip open their belly. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it’s not dirt, it’s the blood and gut of what was once your best friend, you’ll know what to do.
I don’t want any messages saying ‘I’m holding my position.’ We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing. We’re going to go through the enemy like shit through a tinhorn.
There will be some complaints that we’re pushing our people too hard. I don’t give a damn about such complaints. I believe that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that. My men don’t surrender. I don’t want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he is hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight. That’s not just bullshit either. I want men like the lieutenant in Libya who, with a Luger against his chest, swept aside the gun with his hand, jerked his helmet off with the other and busted the hell out of the Boche with the helmet. Then he picked up the gun and he killed another German. All this time the man had a bullet through his lung. That’s a man for you!
Don’t forget, you don’t know I’m here at all. No word of that fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell they did with me. I’m not supposed to be commanding this army. I’m not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamned Germans. Some day, I want them to rise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl ‘Ach! It’s the goddamned Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!’
Then there’s one thing you men will be able to say when this war is over and you get back home. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, ‘What did you do in the great World War Two?’ You won’t have to cough and say, ‘Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.’ No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say ‘Son, your granddaddy rode with the great Third Army and a son-of-a-goddamned-bitch named George Patton!’
All right, you sons of bitches. You know how I feel. I’ll be proud to lead you wonderful guys in battle anytime, anywhere. That’s all.
Steve
I think Lord Kitchener might have disagreed with you there.
They closed down a local school due to falling numbers, that led to the rest of the schools being full and portacabins brought in.
Not helped by municipal and provincial legislation on increasing housing density and the approval of 1,500 new housing units in the area, but I suppose joined up thinking can’t be expected.
Consider how many dickless losers in our society can’t bring themselves to ejaculate inside a woman.
Have you seen the women in our society?
If they aren’t fugly heffalumps, they’re probably three sheets to the wind.
If they aren’t three sheets to the wind, they’re probably mental.
And all of them might just change their mind and accuse you of something afterwards because metoo and everyone wants to be a victim for some reason.
Personally I don’t blame them.
I went and found someone sensible from a sensible country to form a family with.
Chernyy Drakon – Have you seen the women in our society?
If they aren’t fugly heffalumps, they’re probably three sheets to the wind.
If they aren’t three sheets to the wind, they’re probably mental.
And all of them might just change their mind and accuse you of something afterwards because metoo and everyone wants to be a victim for some reason.
I don’t care. We must arrest the demographic death spiral so they’re just going to have to shag each other or else. I don’t care how many subsidised 90’s disco nights at £1 a pint that takes. They can have free bags of pickled onion Space Raiders while they’re at it. Why not?
We’re talking total jihad on the IKEA furniture childless furbaby couple. The Western train has too many free riders, sprog having master race 4 lyfe.
Ottokring – but you couldn’t have an army of Kitcheners. You want shaggers, because shaggers win.
’That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war.’
Could we trouble you to turn up on time at least, General?
Fewer schools? Presumably, but maybe not;
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthsummarytablesenglandandwales/2022
Figure 1.
After the mid-70s, pretty consistent pattern, two sets peaks and troughs, roughly 22/23 years peak to peak. Growth rates about the same, ~23%. Last peak in 2012, so, should be seeing the upswing beginning right about now.
Mothball ’em. Don’t demolish or convert, since you’ll just have to build from scratch in the future. Which’ll probably happen once the 2031 census numbers are in, so construction begins right at the likely peak anyway.
Slightly weird thought; to what degree is the education system dependent upon non-market hours? Parents overseeing homework, obvs. but competition/cooperation ‘tween the sprogs themselves, siblings?
Weird thing those population peaks. They started after WW1 with a big drop in available men, and the cycle coincided with WW2 and reinforced it. So we’ve had generational peaks in births. But we’ve not had a great winnowing since then, so the peaks are spreading out as the 40-year-old mothers on their third starts overlapping with the next generation’s 20-year-old on their first. I’ve been graphing the results since the 2021 census and pondering when it will all smear out again.