Eugenie Dolberg, 44, feels heartbroken every time she approaches the school gates. The artist and mother-of-two has felt a particular affinity with her daughter’s school, Colvestone Primary in Dalston, ever since staff were so kind and patient with her other daughter, who has ADHD, throughout the turbulent years of Covid lockdowns.
Despite being in the heart of Hackney, Dolberg says Colvestone had always maintained a “village school” feel: it has long been popular with families of children with special needs for its calm, nurturing environment; is the only non-denominatoinal school in Dalston; and parents say its small, single-form nature is at the heart of its appeal, with children from all year groups playing together in a historic, Grade-II listed building next to Ridley Road Market.
But in the last few weeks, a storm has been threatening to destroy Colvestone’s inner London idyll. Just days before students broke up for the Easter holidays last month, Hackney Council announced that the school was at risk of closure due to falling pupil numbers. This is the latest in a series of school closures in London as Brexit, a post-pandemic exodus to the countryside, and soaring living costs force young families to flee the capital. According to estate agent Hamptons, almost a fifth more Londoners are buying homes outside of the capital than before the pandemic — a record.
The Dolbergs are just one of hundreds of families left devastated by the news of closures like Colvestone’s. The council says remaining pupils will be merged with those at a larger nearby school, Princess May. However, many current and former Colvestone parents — including the author Michael Rosen — have compiled a 62-page dossier campaigning to call off the plans. They argue that the plans aren’t just enormously disruptive for current pupils, but that closing schools across the capital is short-termist and will only force more families to leave.
“It’s so sad... Councils need to stop giving up on the idea that London is a place for families to live,” says Tara Mack, a parent-governor with a daughter in Year 5. “It’s going to be disruptive,” say parents Corine and Brandon Bishop, who worry their daughter with special needs will refuse to go to her new school when Colvestone closes.
Dolberg calls the proposed closure “frightening”. “The kids are going to find this unbelievably traumatic, after everything they’ve been through [with Covid] in the last few years,” she says. “We have to start asking ourselves: what kind of city do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a city without any children?”
Almost certainly not, if we want the parents who raise these children to keep working as our city’s nurses, teachers, builders and firefighters. Yet recent months have seen this strange child-free dystopia become an increasingly more plausible prospect as gentrification, spiralling living costs and falling birth rates continue to hollow out the heart of the city.
Schools — particularly primary schools — have found themselves at the sharper end of this hollowing out. Since funding is per pupil and with a 17 per cent fall in London’s birth rate since 2012, many schools quite literally cannot afford to stay open (for every primary pupil that leaves, a school loses about £4,000). Latest figures show 29 out of the 32 London boroughs are expecting a drop in demand for places in reception classes. There is a predicted 7.3 per cent fall in reception numbers and a 3.5 per cent drop in Year 7 numbers in secondary schools by 2026.
In many areas of London, this plummeting of pupil numbers to 2010 levels has already begun. In the borough of Hackney alone, six schools are currently under threat of mergers or closures, with 589 fewer kids in reception today than in 2014 — the equivalent of roughly 20 vacant classrooms. The nearby borough of Camden has seen a 20 per cent drop in pupil numbers since 2012, with four schools closing since 2019. The latest, St Michael’s Primary, was forced to close last month without even making it to the end of the school year. There are fears that St Dominic’s in Gospel Oak might have to follow suit. It has only 40 pupils left and staff are unsure whether they’ll be able to meet the building’s energy costs until the end of the school year.
Haringey is reported to be the worst-hit borough so far, with applications down 14.1 per cent year-on-year. But it’s not just a north London problem. Southwark has warned that 16 primaries are at risk, while Lambeth is projected to become the worst-hit borough, with Archbishop Tenison’s — the 338-year-old secondary opposite Oval Cricket Ground — the latest to announce an abrupt closure at the end of next term, leaving pupils scrabbling for places elsewhere. “We’re still in shock,” says Tomeka Miller, 42, a parent at the school, whose daughter will be one of hundreds forced to join a new school just before or midway through her GCSEs.
Meanwhile, London’s leafier outer boroughs are facing the opposite problem. In the Greater London borough of Barking and Dagenham, there’s been a 34 per cent increase in households with children — a jump any local council would struggle to handle.
Education leaders say the situation is now at “crisis point”. "It points to what Camden and other central boroughs may look like in the future and it’s bleak,” says Andrew Dyer, the National Education Union’s branch secretary for Camden. Helen Connor, executive headteacher of Rhyl Primary in Camden, agrees. "When a school closes, it’s devastating, it’s the heart of the community — there is so much that they offer. When that’s not there any more, the community is going to start to fall apart... If you don’t have schools, we won’t have educated young people working in the community.”
So what’s the solution to all of this? Greater government funding from Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, more affordable inner London housing, and an attitude change towards state schools, according to campaigners fighting to save London’s schools. Lambeth Council recently launched an action plan to manage surplus places at its schools and says it is lobbying the Government to provide better funding. Meanwhile, Camden Council leader Georgia Gould is calling for an end to the housing benefit cap, which limits the amount families in London can receive to £23,000. Just under 40 per cent of Camden’s teenagers attend private school, so families in the borough have also launched their own campaign, Meet The Parents, encouraging more “aspirational parents” to at least consider local state options.
But what about the schools that have already closed — how do we support those children? Won’t schools continuing to close trigger a vicious cycle of parents fleeing the capital? And what happens to the economic powerhouse that is London if it loses all its families?
“I guess London will just become this transient spot: you come in, you live there for a bit, then you leave,” says Sam Carew, 44, a father of four who’s among the growing numbers of parents who’ve felt forced to leave for more affordable counties outside the capital. The footwear company founder and his wife Lisa, 42, had lived in the same two-bedroom flat in Lewisham for a decade and never wanted to leave. They were deeply embedded in the local community: Sam was a governor at the children’s school, Trinity Lewisham; Lisa ran a playground for local children; and both were heavily involved in their local church.
But by 2021 their rent had reached £1,400 a month and with two-bed houses in the area costing upwards of £1.2 million, the prospect of getting onto the London property ladder felt impossible. They moved to Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, just a 50-minute train into King’s Cross, and bought a four-bedroom house with a garage and garden for just £227,000.
“It was completely devastating... but it became a no-brainer,” says Sam. “All bar one of my core group of London friends have now left London for similar reasons... Every time I go back to Lewisham now there are new houses being built, but I don’t hear of any new schools being built. Maybe that’s the thing now: so many people are leaving, they don’t need any new schools.”
Carew’s comments point to a growing concern among London’s professional families. While it has long been a rite of passage for young parents to up sticks to the suburbs or countryside in search of space, the reality they are seeing in London today is far from a case of a few more couples taking that leap than usual. It goes beyond that, with officials like Gould warning that it’s happening at a speed and scale beyond anything they could have imagined. Less than a decade ago, inner London parents would find themselves in a mad scrum for primary school places; now, it’s the schools that are in a mad scrum to find enough pupils, with parents citing safety as a key reason they’re decamping to the countryside in such big numbers. With more than 150 teenagers murdered in London in the last seven years, many are increasingly afraid of raising their children in urban areas. Air pollution is another growing reason cited by parents upping sticks.
“We’re sinking,” Richard Slade, headteacher of Plumcroft Primary School in Greenwich, recently told the Evening Standard of the “starvation rations” funding crisis many London schools find themselves in as a result of falling pupil numbers. Education leaders are now warning that there could be tens of thousands of surplus primary school staff in the next five years and that it’s often staff like teaching assistants and cleaners who are first to be laid off — meaning a lower-quality and potentially less safe experience for pupils. “It costs the same to run a class of 23 as it does a class of 30,” Ed Davie, the council cabinet member for children and young people in Lambeth, said recently, describing the drastic measures many headteachers will be forced to take before closing.
Each closure also comes with a significant social cost. “My daughter has lost so many friends over the years as her class gets smaller and families move out... it’s heartbreaking,” says Mack, a Colvestone parent. Others point to the “turbulent” few years this age group has already been through thanks to the pandemic.
“They’re the group who never got to finish primary school because of Covid — they didn’t have any leaving parties or proms, and they didn’t get to start Year 7 or Year 8 properly either, so Years 9 and 10 really would’ve finally been a chance for school to settle down a bit,” says Miller of her daughter’s unsettling few years at Archbishop Tenison’s. Her daughter has been allocated a new school by the council, but it’ll be a longer journey from home and she’ll be separated from several of her friends.
In Colvestone’s case, the closure feels like a particular blow for local parents. Colvestone Crescent, the street the school sits on, was recently chosen to become Hackney’s first “21st-century street”. This included new green space in place of cars, bike storage, electric vehicle charging, and tree cover for at least 40 per cent of the road. The school was at the heart of the reason it won the bid, so closing it feels like a symbol of a terrifying future they are keen to avoid. “The idea of a 21st-century street with no children on it feels quite dystopian,” says Dolberg.
She and Mack are both lucky enough to have bought houses over a decade ago, so can afford to stay in the area. But they fear the closure of schools will signal a death knell for the community, driving more families away and putting off potential new ones, reducing spending in the borough as a whole. “It’ll become a vicious cycle,” says Mack, who worries for her children’s future if they ever want to raise a family in London. England’s school population is set to shrink by almost a million children over the next decade, so she fears the problem will only get worse. And even if it doesn’t: “Schools are not like a tap you can just turn off and then back on again. Do [councils] think they’re just going to open them up again in a few years?”
Dolberg agrees: Hackney has always been her home but it’s quickly losing the magic ingredients such as diversity and inclusion that always made it so special. “This area has always been really mixed. People from all over the world come here to live alongside each other,” she says. “But why are families going to move to an area where there is no local school?”
