Some Academies 'a quarter empty'

By Gary Eason
Education editor, BBC News website

Some Academies are in areas of high pupil turnover

Some Academies - the independent state schools the government says are "popular with parents" - have hundreds of empty places.

Surplus capacity can be inevitable as new Academies fill, usually replacing existing schools in deprived areas.

But there are more than 2,600 empty desks in Academies that have been open for years, official figures suggest.

Seven have more than 10% spare capacity. In one of them the surplus last year was 31% or 391 places.

The progress of the Academies has been the subject of a series of reports by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Schools Minister Jim Knight has quoted their final report as saying Academies are "popular with parents - there are three applications for every Academy place".

This is an average. Most are oversubscribed, but PwC said there was considerable variation.

"Five have experienced declines in their total numbers of pupils since they became an Academy and two have had growth rates of more than 100%."

Most spaces

Some have more pupils than places. The London Academy in Barnet, for example, had 1,238 places but 1,347 pupils on its roll last year - 109 over capacity - according to the published surplus places data based on annual surveys of local authorities.

There is now a waiting list for places David Hearn Greig City Academy

But Walsall Academy was 17% empty. Two other London institutions - City of London Academy in Southwark and The Academy at Peckham - were said to be 19% unfilled: 230 and 274 places.

Worst of all there were officially 391 unfilled places at Greig City Academy in Haringey in north London: 31% of the total.

Greig vice-principal David Hearn said the Academy had suffered from the reputation locally of its predecessor school but the figures were now 16 months out of date and it was growing in popularity all the time - bolstered by a recent good Ofsted report.

"There is now a waiting list for places in our present Year 7 and for Year 7 places in September 2009," he said.

"Our projections show the school population increasing to 1200 over the next three years.

"There is probably not enough teaching space for the 1050 students we will have in September.

"The school is already planning an extension to the sixth form common room and investigating the possibility of building a new teaching block somewhere on the site."

Our mission is providing a good school on the doorsteps of the poorest communities Kathy August Manchester Academy

His reckoning was that schools' reputations were typically four or five years out of date - for better or worse.

"When we get people in, we may not persuade everybody that it is the school for their kid but it has changed their perception of what the school is actually like."

Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough - the first to fail an Ofsted inspection, in 2005 - was said to have 283 surplus places or a quarter (24%) of its capacity.

Manchester Academy was in a similar position, with 297 spaces free (26%). It has just been rated "outstanding" by Ofsted inspectors.

Figures queried

Manchester Academy's executive director, Kathy August, said the school had a highly mobile population, with an annual "churn" of pupils coming and going of 24% .

It draws from postcodes in the Moss Side area - making it the 16th most deprived secondary school in England.

Four-fifths of its intake are from minority ethnic groups - almost a third of them Somali - and three-quarters have English as a second language.

"Our mission is providing a good school on the doorsteps of the poorest communities," she said.

This militated against having a stable and full school.

Mrs August went through her figures: out of 180 places in each year group she currently has 177 in Year 7 then 150 in Year 8, with 160, 165 and 166 in the other year groups respectively.

There were another 150 in the sixth form, almost entirely new to the country and in local authority care.

Her total of 1,050 does not tally with the total of 1,150 given in the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) surplus places data.

A spokeswoman for the department said it took time to fill places, particularly where a predecessor school had not been full and had been unpopular with parents.

Academies, like other schools, were also vulnerable to falling pupil numbers because of declining birth rates, she said.

The Conservatives are strong backers of the Academy model and question the way the surplus places are calculated, using what is known as a "net capacity" formula.

This is based on floor area - and a Tory spokesman suggested that the spacious designs of new Academy buildings meant they appeared to have more capacity than they were currently using.

If a school built enough space for significant expansion at a later date but chose not to offer that many places, did that count as surplus?