A spat about the ‘crisis in primary school places’ which can be put down to the failure of policy makers to realise that a baby boom will inevitably - & soon - be followed by a rise in demand for school places.
I went through my primary school career being pushed out by pesky little boomers crowding in behind – quite literally as the top classes were often moved out to some kind of emergency accommodation, in at least two cases a fair distance to walk from the main school site.
I seem to remember that there was some sort of emergency programme to train teachers – many of them men who had been in the forces during the war. Partly as a result three out of my four class teachers at what we used to call Junior School (Years 3 to 6), were men, though my top class teacher was much older & had spent his life in teaching.
By coincidence I have just been reading Harold Wilson’s speech on the white hot heat of technology, delivered at the 1963 Labour Party conference.
I was surprised to read that those same post-war boomers were still taking the educational world by surprise:
There are students this year who are failing to secure entry to universities & other colleges of higher education who possess qualifications which a year ago would have got them in. Last year ¼ of those who had the necessary qualifications at A level could not get in because there were not enough places.
This year a much higher proportion will have been excluded … To give students today the same chance to get a place by the late 1960s as they had even in the late 1950s would need between 180,000 & 200,000 places in universities … the governments plan provided only for 150,000.
Perhaps politicians had better start planning now for 2020.
In the meantime those boomers have a good riposte with which to counter complaints from today’s student generation who point to the one-time availability of full grants.
Only for the very lucky few.
