Alicia Perez’s son was 10 when she had to tell him that his London primary school was closing down. Once the reality sank in, “he couldn’t stop crying,” says Perez, a childminder and mother of four.
Their school, Highbury Quadrant, announced it was closing last year. Islington Council said falling birth rates had left 561 reception places unfilled across the borough’s primary schools – the equivalent of more than 18 empty classes. Highbury Quadrant is one of three primary schools that have closed in the borough in the past two years; across London, nearly 40 have shut their doors.
For parents and children, the impact of a closure can be profound. After their school shut its doors in summer 2025, Perez was told that her children, going into year one and year six, could be allocated a new primary school up to two miles away. Her youngest suffers with motion sickness on buses, and when she did a test run walking that distance it took an hour and a half. “The council said it would build resilience,” she says, “but why should my kids have to prove their resilience?”
Once parents became aware of the impending closure, the number of pupils at Highbury Quadrant began to dwindle. Perez felt she had no choice but to accept the place at a school out of the borough, in Hackney. “My kids were the only ones from Highbury moving to the school they are at now, so they had no friends there and had to restart all over again.” The move caused considerable disruption to her eldest’s education, she adds, with year six being a pivotal year before the transition to secondary.
Such stories are being told across the country. In England, declining birth rates have led to over 100 schools permanently closing in the last decade. The steepest declines have been seen in London and other cities, with Lambeth and Southwark among other boroughs particularly badly hit.
Islington now has one of the lowest fertility rates in England: women there are having children at a rate equivalent to just 0.99 per woman of childbearing age, compared with 1.41 nationally.
The shrinking schools forced to cut teachers, school trips and sport
At Highbury Quadrant, the fall in pupil numbers happened over a relatively short period of time, the former head Terri Higgins – who received praise from Ofsted for her leadership of the school – explains. “In the pandemic, we had overseas parents go home, families moving back to Australia, New Zealand… any families who could leave London did. What we noticed after the pandemic was there weren’t new children coming in to replace them.”
England’s state schools are largely funded according to the number of pupils they teach, so when school rolls fall, so does their income.
But the costs of running a school, from teachers and support staff to buildings and heating, do not shrink at the same rate. To stay open, headteachers are being faced with devastating decisions – cutting support staff and teaching assistants, replacing experienced teachers with cheaper newly qualified ones and merging with other schools.
The National Foundation for Educational Research found 71 per cent of primary leaders were anticipating a budget deficit for 2025-26. Among those specifically concerned about falling pupil rolls, 69 per cent said they had already cut support staff. And according to the Sutton Trust, 53 per cent of primary and secondary school leaders reported cutting spending on trips and outings this year – the highest level since the question was first asked in 2017 – while a third had scaled back sport and other extracurricular activities.
“In London, a pupil will attract £6,000 to £7,000, so each pupil you lose is costing you quite a lot,” explains Jon Andrews, a director and head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute. A class falling from 30 to 25 pupils loses roughly £35,000 of budget “but you’re still needing a teacher in front of that class – and potentially a teaching assistant, too,” he says.
‘My kids were the only ones from Highbury moving to the school they are at now, so they had no friends there and had to restart all over again,’ says Perez, adding the move caused considerable disruption to her eldest’s education (Photo: Teri Pengilley)‘So many children left, we were running at 50 per cent capacity’
Secondary schools have a bit more leeway to deal with this, he notes, by dropping GCSE subject options or increasing class sizes. “But in primary schools there’s quite limited flexibility. Your numbers have to fall by a significant amount before you can start losing teachers.”
In the majority of cases, this won’t end in school closures, he caveats, “but most of the pupil number falls are going to result in schools having to do the same things for less money”.
For unions, falling rolls like these represent a missed opportunity rather than an inevitable crisis. According to Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, the Government faces a choice: “It can continue its current course – failing to address the damage from years of underfunding, locking in high class sizes, leaving school staff burnt out and schools running on empty. Or it can begin to undo the harm caused by a decade and a half of neglect, create smaller, more inclusive classes and address the crisis in the system.”
But at Highbury Quadrant, that choice had already been made. The school was forced to move first from two-form entry to one-and-a-half and then down to one-form entry shortly before the closure was announced in December 2024. By this point, it had 161 pupils against a capacity of 360, having lost 115 pupils since 2020. That number fell further still, to just 144, by January 2025.
“Once you go to one-and-a-half or one-form entry, your expenditure doesn’t change in many ways, but your income does,” Higgins notes. “As a leadership team, you can’t explicitly say we’re losing children so we’re making cuts, because that just scares everybody. So people start moving, you lose your best teachers and can’t afford to replace them, and the mood becomes: well, I’m now doing the job of two people.”
Cutting teaching assistant support wasn’t an option at Highbury Quadrant because the school had high SEND and behavioural needs, so it was the extracurricular activities that suffered. Music teaching was cut, educational visits were cut. “You only do the stuff that’s free, that parents can volunteer for,” she explains. “And when you have a very vulnerable community like ours, what they can contribute is limited. It’s just a sort of slashing of your morale day by day, because you know what the children need, but you just don’t have the money to do it.”
‘We had just 10 children in our reception class – I had to choose which staff to let go’
Where the school did need to recruit, this became increasingly challenging too, because it was unable to offer competitive salaries. “So you’re looking at newly qualified teachers,” Higgins observes, “but those aren’t the teachers who’ve got the expertise to manage the complex needs. We felt we could only coach and develop one NQT a year.”
This is a scenario with which Denise McCarney, the former Head of Vittoria Primary School in Islington, is also familiar. A successful amalgamation with nearby Copenhagen Primary kept the school open, but McCarney recalls the impact dwindling numbers of pupils had on the school in the run-up to the merger. “By that point, we only had between 10 and 12 pupils in reception, and I was always faced in budget meetings with: which staff can you do without?” she remembers. “I had to change my thinking too: which staff are ‘best value’… it was horrible.”
Like Higgins, McCarney also found herself losing some of her stronger staff members when the future of the school became uncertain. Even once the amalgamation had been announced, she was unable to tell staff members whether their jobs were safe or not. “Then, we had this big joint meeting with union reps where we had to lay out a plan,” she recollects. “I remember one member of staff who we had decided we were going to make redundant… It was just the most horrendous process.”
Once she’d seen the process through, McCarney decided to take early retirement. “I was just about to turn 60 and I felt a bit exhausted by all of it,” she says. “Plus, I was leaving a ship with a very fantastic captain,” she adds, referring to her deputy, who became the head of the amalgamated school.
The pressures McCarney and Higgins describe are being felt well beyond Islington. Across England, demand for primary school places fell by 3 per cent between 2018–19 and 2024–25, while the proportion of unfilled places rose from 10 per cent to 14 per cent. The Department for Education now projects a further 10.7 per cent fall in the number of children in state-funded nursery and primary schools between 2026 and 2031 – equivalent to almost half a million pupils.
How Brexit fuelled the London exodus
Schools managed by the local authority are at far greater risk of closure, Andrew says, because unlike a multi-academy trust, which can move money and even pupils across the schools within it, standalone community schools have less flexibility. Nor does a local authority have the power to close an academy – so when there aren’t enough children to fill places, it’s the schools it maintains directly that end up bearing the brunt of closure decisions.
London has borne a disproportionate share of the decline. The capital’s primary school population has fallen by 6.25 per cent since peaking in 2017–18. Between 2013 and 2023, the city gained around 506,000 residents overall, while its population of zero-to nine-year-olds fell by 99,100.
Part of the explanation is straightforward: people are having fewer children. But London’s decline has also been sharpened by families leaving the capital altogether. “It doesn’t look like it’s just a birth rate issue,” Andrews asserts. “We have seen increased movements of pupils going out of London, particularly to other local authorities in the South East and East of England.” Breaking the data down by ethnicity, he adds, shows “particular increases around white Irish and white European pupils leaving – so potentially some Brexit effects, too.”
A further factor is pupils leaving the state system altogether. It’s unlikely this means a shift into the independent sector – instead, Andrews speculates that rising numbers of parents are turning to homeschooling. Perez says several parents of children at Highbury Quadrant declared an intention to homeschool once the closure was announced, and McCarney recalls the same happening at Vittoria ahead of the amalgamation.
Andrews argues for reforms to the per-pupil funding model. He also argues that the Government should not use falling rolls “as a mechanism by which to save money” – the overall schools budget should instead be protected, with any savings retargeted toward disadvantaged pupils. Schools with more disadvantaged intakes, he notes, tend to be “less attractive to parents because results tend to be lower” under the current accountability system – and so are likely to be hit hardest by falling rolls.
It’s a dynamic Higgins recognises from her own experience. Highbury Quadrant served a disadvantaged community, she notes, conceding that some affluent local families “wouldn’t look twice” at the school because of it. But the school was deeply rooted in that community, she argues. Schools “where the kids from the estate go” like Highbury Quadrant, she believes, are at greater risk of closure precisely because they aren’t the first pick for wealthier families. Closing them, she argues, risks widening that imbalance rather than solving it.
Perez agrees. Highbury Quadrant, she says, was one of the only secular schools in the area, serving a diverse population that included Muslim families like her own, who might not want their children to attend a Catholic or Church of England faith school. “Everyone knew everyone at Highbury Quadrant,” she says.
Her children eventually came to terms with the move, she adds, and her son approached the start of the school year “with a better mindset”. Still, she says, the loss of their local primary school “left a huge gap in the community which can’t easily be filled”.
Hence then, the article about we ran out of children how the baby bust is devastating primary schools was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( ‘We ran out of children’: How the baby bust is devastating primary schools )
Also on site :
- 1976 Rock Song, Ranked Among ‘Greatest Songs of All Time,’ Was Created in a Watertown Basement Studio
- 1992 Soft Rock Hit, Named the Best No. 1 Song by a Fictional Band, Is Back in the Spotlight 34 Years Later
- Iran plans to announce an ‘exclusion zone’ that runs from the U.S. naval blockade line, through the Strait of Hormuz, and into the Persian Gulf