A new baby boom is reaching school age, and we’re not prepared
Some time in the next week or so, all being well, my wife will have baby number three. That means more hours spent in Battersea Park’s playground, a flocking place for parents who inhabit that sliver of south-west London known as Nappy Valley. Go there any Saturday morning and you’ll see toddlers everywhere: squabbling on the swings, pushing each other off the pirate ship. Having lived in London for 20 years, I’m used to a crush of commuters. But toddler overcrowding strikes me as something new.
There are now Nappy Valleys all over Britain — places feeling the blast of a population explosion that our political class seems determined to ignore. Over the past decade, the number of births in England and Wales has increased by 14 per cent. For the first time in years, school rolls are increasing. The problem is that the number of schools is not. Labour may have doubled education spending, but it closed on average 140 schools a year. To keep pace with demand, we should be opening 400 a year.
Our baby boom was widely predicted, and along with it the need for more schools. Yet educational officialdom looked the other way. Those who dared raise concerns were vilified. The results can now be seen in a vicious battle for primary school places. Councils in London need 70,000 more places over the next four years. Bristol claims to need 3,000, which is 14 small primary schools. The tale is the same in Luton, Leeds, Swindon, Poole, Eastbourne, Coventry, Rotherham, Darlington — anywhere you see toddlers queuing for swings, you’ll find a nightmare.
For my ‘cohort’ (to use the official term), the parents of the very young, the question is not whether your child has been granted your first choice of primary school, but of whether your child has been given any school place at all. Parents are told to wait while the council finds a solution — often overflow classes in a unpopular school with space to fill. Private schools, meanwhile, have responded to the demand with long waiting lists and fees that you need to be a hedge fund manager to afford. The school game, already ferociously competitive, has become that much tougher.
And if you don’t have school-age children, don’t think you will escape the impact of this bulge. Britain’s population is growing twice as fast as in the 1990s: already at 62.6 million, it is projected to grow in the next five years alone by a further 2.1 million. This is the result of longer lives as well as the baby bulge — Britain will soon have more pensioners than children. Then there is immigration, which has both a direct effect and a role in the rising birth rate: one in eight children born in the past decade had at least one immigrant parent, and every second child born in London has an immigrant mother. If David Cameron doesn’t meet his pledge of cutting net migration to ‘tens of thousands’ a year, the population will rise to 70 million over the next two decades, and then keep on rising. Just over two thirds of this increase will be down to immigration.
The implications are radical. Our state today still operates according to the needs of Britain circa 1950, when the population was just 50 million, so how will it be able to cope with a population almost half as big again? If we want people to own their homes, is it time to relax the green belt — a product of post-war planning — and increase the supply of land? With more people living (and working) into their eighties and nineties, should we dispense with a fixed retirement age? Can we afford to give the elderly free bus passes and TV licences? And if our public services are to cope with the growing numbers we face, isn’t it time to start encouraging private companies to set up their own schools or to run larger chunks of the NHS, and for the state to pay them for the number of children it educates or patients they treat?
The green belt, the welfare state and the public services are all systems with which politicians fear even to tinker. The backlash can be fearsome. Just look at the current furore over the NHS. But ignoring the problem did not make the toddler crisis go away, nor will it make the other problems go away. If we continue as we are, with a growing population expecting more from a larger state, our quality of life and quite possibly our prosperity will be diminished. We need to be ready for the battle of the bulge. Meanwhile, Battersea Park needs more swings.
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