Member

Where things get messy is where there is falling demand, either through demography or through weak schools operating with larger PANs—pupil admission numbers—than they can justify. Parents are not stupid and, once the reputation of a school starts to slide, the discriminating ones will be looking elsewhere. In my experience in Norfolk, too often these weak schools, in the primary phase particularly, are local authority schools. But, rather than face the necessary pain of reducing their size through limiting the PAN or even closing them, they follow the line of least resistance, asking good or outstanding schools to reduce their intake so that children in the catchment can be “spread around”. This is convenient for bureaucrats: no unseemly costs in closing useless schools. Instead, the problem is “solved” by clawing in children who could otherwise receive a good or outstanding education nearby. But if these good schools are choked off, the problem is quite “solved”.