Teachers at Charlotte Sharman school in south London’s Elephant and Castle are on strike this week, protesting against the fact that the primary school will be forced to close at the end of term. It is one of many inner London schools facing closure as a result of a 25% drop in under-fours in some boroughs, according to the most recent census. Charlotte Sharman is just around the corner from the site of the Heygate estate, which was demolished in 2014 and replaced by Elephant Park, a development of thousands of luxury apartments, built by the Australian developer Lendlease. After the Heygate was knocked down, the school roll slumped.
Elephant Park, which has won many awards for “placemaking excellence”, is seen as an exemplar of a new global regeneration industry. In place of lower- and middle-income family housing, the new neighbourhoods are typically created to include luxury apartments set in high-security privatised public space, global retail brands, pop-ups, expensive bars and restaurants, and often a university or art gallery to provide cultural capital.
When you build a new development you, the developer, have to pay for all the infrastructure to surround it. Section 106.
But once the development is built you can’t change it because that would mean the infrastructure that has been built won’t be needed any more.
Looking at https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CDP-2023-0115/CDP-2023-0115.pdf and a bit of google:
London has a higher proportion of unfilled school places compared with the
national average. In May 2022, 14.5% of mainstream state-funded primary and
secondary school places in London were unfilled.
In England 12.0% of primary and secondary school places were unfilled.
And primary numbers seem to be dropping at 1% a year for the next few years, but twice as fast in London.
Of all the reasons being advanced for the higher drop off in London, high housing cost is in there, but not seen a mention of emigration by young families to the provinces due to pointy knife crime.
As I recall the Heygate estate was such a dump the council couldn’t find enough tenants willing to live there.
Gentrification.
Twenty-five per cent of the new homes are designated “affordable”, but since the government changed the definition of affordable in 2010 to mean up to 80% of market rent or market value, that is financially far out of reach for the majority of Londoners and their families.
Maybe they shouldn’t be living in London then, given that this is the state of housing there:
https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/the-social-housing-phenomenon-part
Also:
Fernanda, an architect and mother of two who lives in Hackney, described how it’s not just schools, but GP surgeries and small businesses – what she calls the “ecosystem of the city” – that are closing. “It is getting emptier and emptier and there is a clear change in demographics happening in front of our eyes,”
The Left has found demographic change they don’t like…
Maybe times have changed but it used to be that if a university department was closed because it couldn’t attract enough students, people just shrugged.
Mind you, one consequence was closing departments of physics, chemistry, and engineering, and opening or expanding departments of grievance studies.
Anyway I look back at perfectly good secondary schools closed by the Forces of Progress in the 70s and later and just shrug at a primary school being closed for perfectly good reason.
Crime?
Big US cities – Democrat run cities – are decaying rapidly, and collapse of the criminal justice system is a big part of it. Is it part of the problem in London as well?
DM: I started doing Physics as part of my Computing Science degree in the 1980s, but it was such basic stuff – stuff I’d done before O levels – that I moved to Japanese instead. A couple of years later I noticed they’d closed the Physics department.
15 years ago I was in the area and wandered around the campus. I noticed they’d closed the Computing Science department, and the courses were part of the School Of Business.
“Teachers … are on strike this week, protesting against the fact that the primary school will be forced to close at the end of term”
‘We don’t think this school should close, so we’re going to close it’