Our recent analysis of school provision cold spots included a somewhat throwaway remark at the end which suggested that the free schools programme might not be the answer to this particular systemic shortcoming because it tends to favour places where people have the wherewithal to set up a new school, and these won't necessarily coincide with the places where they are most needed. This post looks into that claim in a bit more detail.
Figure 1 shows the locations of all the free schools opened since 2018. Red dots indicate primary school, blue dots secondary schools and green dots all-through schools (ie, those serving both primary and secondary pupils). There are 205 in all, of which 50 opened in 2018, 54 in 2019, 36 in 2020, another 36 in 2021, 28 in 2022 and just one so far in 2023 (which isn't surprising since most new schools open in September). Click here to see all years again.. To put this in perspective, there are over 20,000 mainstream state primary and secondary schools in England, so these amount to an addition of only about 1% – though of course even a single new school can have a big impact in the community where it is located.
