How the city council plans to work out the number of new school places needed in Peterborough

Peterborough City Council has used a complex calculation to predict the expected number of children in future homes built in the city.

The exercise is required to plan education provision so there will be enough places in schools.

These ‘multipliers’, which underpin the forecast, have not been reviewed since 1998, when Peterborough became a unitary authority.

Michael Soper, Research Team Manager Addressing told members of the city Cabinet at their online meeting this week: “In order to plan education provision for new housing developments, the Council’s Research Team provides forecasts of pupil numbers.

“These ‘multipliers’, as they are known, are then used to calculate demand for school places from children living within new developments underpin these forecasts.

“The forecasts then form the basis for either negotiation with developers as part of a s.106 agreement, to support the Council’s case for its infrastructure requirements to be funded via the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), or for bids into Department for Education (DfE) capital funds.

“Forecasting the number of children that will live in a new development is a complex evidence led process.

“The Council’s Research Team has a developed methodology over many years, based on: Analysis of NHS Child Health (CHIS) data; Analysis of administrative data such as the PLASC (Census of school pupils); Local surveys of new developments; and Whole population analysis such as local population estimates, where relevant the Census and GP registrations.

“This data is then applied to a selection of recent case studies for new developments in the area. In this case The Hamptons (post 2010 build), Cardea/Stanground South and Paston.

“This is one of those elements of local government that, if you get your forecast numbers of children arriving on new developments and arrangements with the developers for a suitable number of education facilities right, then nobody notices.

“However, when you get it wrong, there’s insufficient school places, it creates headlines and there’s no end of fuss, stress and problems for the local authority – so we make sure from behind the scenes that we do everything possible to get our forecasts correct, hence the need for these ‘Child Yield Multipliers’ (CYMs).”

Cllr Lynne Ayers, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, Education, Skills and the University, added: “Since 2018, the 0-19 Education Planning Service has been working with the Business Intelligence Service to replicate for Peterborough the same set of forecasting and place planning tools which are integral to the place planning strategies used in Cambridgeshire, revealing the CYMs as the final outcome of this work.

“The CYMs are an important took in the planning of provision for new communities and are used to forecast the numbers of children for a given number of new homes, accounting for development size, number of bedrooms and tenure type.

“Where new educational infrastructure can be funded externally – for example through s.106 and developer contributions – officers can evidence robustly to planners and developers, the council’s requirements and so maximise the funding from this source and avoid the risk of education capital projects being underfunded.

“Like all forecasting tools, CYMs need to be up to date, and credible; they need to reflect accurately the situation for Peterborough in terms of the numbers of children arriving on new housing developments.

“Forecasting the number of children who will live on new developments is complex; but officers in the Business Intelligence Service have over many years developed a methodology through which the calculation of CYMs is devised.

“This methodology is based on three items: first, the analysis of census data and NHS 0-4 years data; secondly, an analysis of schools’ data for past new developments; and thirdly, surveys of new local developments.”

Cllr Steve Allen asked: “Are you saying that socially-rented properties create different issues compared to rent-to-buy, shared ownership, or market rent properties, and how do you delineate that?”.

Mr Soper replied: “The main thing for us is to discern the social rented housing i.e. rented from the council or a housing association, compared to the remainder of the other forms of housing that may be on a development.

“Socially-rented housing generates many more children, creating higher pressure on the number of school places available, compared to the other tenures.

“The general CYMs are applied where details of the housing mix are not known, or at the early stages of a development and likely to change.

“Where a detailed intended housing mix of a new development is known in full, it is possible to forecast the number of children that might be expected to live in individual properties based on the number of bedrooms and whether they are market or social rented dwellings.

“For example, 100 three-bedroom market properties would be expected to house around 30 primary aged children compared to around 80 primary-aged children from 100 three-bedroom social rented properties.”

Cllr Marco Cereste asked: “Does anybody know why child yield from socially rented housing is so much higher than for market housing?”

Mr Soper responded: “Social housing is calculated on a ‘needs’ basis, with that need requiring it to be expressed – in other words there is no concept of a ‘spare room’ in socially rented housing – you generally try and fit the family size to the unit.

“Whereas, if I was buying a house with a mortgage, I would go and buy as much as I possibly could afford, and that might include a spare room – for whatever reason.

“During planning for education provision on new developments, there is the requirement for more detailed modelling as information on tenure and house/bedroom size becomes available.

“The data from the new development surveys support this work by feeding in information on the pupil yield for different sizes and tenures of housing, enabling a standard model to be built”.

Clare Buckingham, Strategic Education Place Planning Manager, added: “Considering the evidence and validation process, the conclusion of the work undertaken is that the general CYMs should be: 20 – 30 pre-school aged children (0 – 3 years) per 100 dwellings; 35 – 45 primary age children (4 – 10 years) per 100 dwellings; and 23 – 33 secondary age pupils (11 – 15 years) per 100 dwellings”.

Cabinet members unanimously adopted the proposed revised CYMs.