One of the major arguments put forward by the Isle of Wight Council as to why they should carry out the proposed primary school closures, is that the schools currently have a short-fall in the number of pupils entering the schools, in turn leading to a reduction in Government grants.
In a conversation with Patrick Joyce today, he explained to VentnorBlog how simple it was for this to be altered.
First a little background. Every year the governors of each school set the number of students that they hope will join their school – being keen to promote their schools, they usually put this figure as high as the school can bear – all very understandable.
If the number of pupils who actually join is lower than this figure, this is judged as a short fall.
For example, if they set the expected number of new joiners at 25, but only 20 actually join, it’s judged to be a 20% shortfall.
How to change it
The simple way to remove this problem is to reduce the number of expected joiners – so, if the initial number was set to 20 and 20 join, the school is judged to be full.
This isn’t just Mr Joyce shooting in the wind either, as he told us, “I’ve been told by the (council) director of children services that this is no problem and that the Government will accept it.”
Return to full £10m grant
The repercussions of this are, if the Government see the schools as “full,” they will release the full £10m, of the Primary Capital Programme as they do currently, rather than the £3m that is expected if it’s perceived that there’s a short fall.
Councillor Joyce was previously in charge of the education reforms at the council under the current Conservative administration and yesterday resigned from the Conservative group in protest of the school reforms.
It’s not just this interesting point he raises, so it’s well worth a listen to the whole interview. [audio:http://otw-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/patrick-joyce-on-school-reforms.mp3]
