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- The Guardian, Thursday 31 January 2008
The trend is painful and the pain is noisily expressed. At question time yesterday Gordon Brown was challenged by Tory MPs about post office closures in rural Sussex and threatened primary schools in thinly-populated Shropshire where 50-pupil schools still exist as they did in the Lark Rise to Candleford era.
Plans to consult on closing 22 Shropshire schools were put on hold by the Tory council, although 16 mergers are to go ahead. Kent, Herefordshire, Gwynedd and other counties remain under pressure. In Scotland, the SNP government is trying to keep such schools open, as Labour has done south of the border since 1998.
It will not resolve conflicting policy priorities or the hard facts of population shift. Schools minister and Dorset MP Jim Knight moved this week to remind local authorities that the 2006 Education Act makes a "presumption" that small schools should stay open where possible.
Fine, but the Local Government Association is quick to recall that just a month ago government guidance urged councils to close or merge schools with surplus places so that funds can be focused on more "popular" schools. That is an urban perspective, suggesting rural parents have a choice like townies.
Knight was last night meeting Stuart Burgess, chairman of the Commission for Rural Communities, who will have told a familiar tale about rural demographics across much of Britain. The modern equivalent of Oliver Goldsmith's 18th century Deserted Village sees an influx of second homers and retirees who help push young families with kids towards the town.
That creates demographic pressures at both ends which Whitehall's annual grant settlement with local authorities fails to capture, being based on outdated 2001 census figures. Unlike migration patterns via Dover and Heathrow, a net town-to-country migration of 80,000 people a year goes largely unremarked, though it helps pile up rural Tory majorities where David Cameron does not need them.
Yesterday the Conservative schools spokesman, Michael Gove, claimed that government policy on surplus places has "contributed" to almost 220 closures of small schools since 1997. Ministers - and outsiders - say Labour has stemmed the closure rate from 30 a year to about seven.
Parents like small primary schools, though many are less keen on too-small secondary ones (or 2,000-pupil "titans" which are growing in number).
All sides invoke "balance". But the hard fact remains that primary numbers are falling by an average 10% a year and schools must close in town and country: at least until current occupants overcrowding the maternity wards reach the age of five.
Staff
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