School’s out – which means that, in politics terms, school is very much in. Pupils across England, Wales and Northern Ireland received their GCSE results yesterday, a week after A-level results came out, which also sparks a week or two of discourse during the summer recess as discrepancies in pass rates, gender balances and whether exams are getting easier become headline news.
Far more attention is paid to those pupils at the end of the school journey, pictured jumping for joy as they receive their exam results, than to those at the beginning. But the summer kicked off with the revelation more significant than the fact that the GCSE pass rate has fallen very slightly from 67.6 per cent to 67.4 per cent…
In June, data released by the Department for Education showed that, for the first time in a decade, the number of children in English schools is decreasing. Primary school pupil numbers have been declining for some time, with fewer children starting school. But now we have passed what Schools Week calls “a demographic tipping point”, after “average infant class sizes decreased from 26.6 pupils to 26.2, the lowest since 2009”.
The fall in the number of pupils starting primary school reflects a fall in the birth rate, which currently stands at 1.44 children per woman in the UK. And it has caught the attention of the Education Secretary. In June, Bridget Phillipson wrote for the Telegraph about her concern, calling the declining birth rate a “trend which has worrying repercussions for society in the future but tells a story, heartbreakingly, about the dashed dreams of many families”, and adding “I want more young people to have children, if they so choose.”
Phillipson added that she has “made improving our early years system my number-one priority”, and listed the various initiatives the government is unrolling to help parents, namely increasing childcare provision and opening school-based nurseries.
This is positive stuff – it builds on plans Labour produced in opposition that were so popular the Conservatives promptly nicked them. Anyone looking at the present state of the UK and wondering why people aren’t having more children cannot avoid confronting the staggering cost of childcare (often referred to as “a second mortgage”).
They also cannot avoid confronting the other staggering cost that sits at the heart of so many thorny policy problems: housing. The average age of a first-time house-buyer in the UK is now 32. Until then, the choice is essentially an overheated and highly insecure private rental market – or moving back in with parents, which almost a fifth of young adults (aged 24-35, peak child-rearing age) have done. Neither of these circumstances is conducive to starting a family. And having depleted any savings and secured a mortgage based on two incomes to make it on to the housing ladder, it is no wonder couples then struggle to work out how to continue paying that mortgage if one of them takes a year or more off to have and raise a baby.
All of which is to say, you can’t fix the birth rate crisis in the UK without fixing either childcare or housing, ideally both. Maybe the new nursery places and planning reform the government promises will lead to 1.5 million new homes by the end of the parliament will mean we’ll see more four-year-olds starting infant school in half a decade’s time when the impacts of those policies has a chance to trickle into the school system.
But then again, maybe we won’t. The truth about the drop in fertility is that it isn’t a British problem. From Japan to the US, Scandinavia to Italy, Russia to South Korea, birth rates are dropping. The reasons are complex, and seem to defy policy initiatives. Pro-natalist policies (a term which – tellingly – focuses on births rather than on being pro-parents or pro-children) like paying women to have children don’t seem to work. Nor do progressive policies like enhanced parental leave and childcare provision. They might have other benefits, like making parenting an easier and less stressful experience or improving educational and health outcomes for children, but they don’t raise the birth rate.
We discuss why this might be on this week’s You Ask Us episode of the New Statesman podcast, out later today. Listen in if you want to hear an anecdote about former Tory MP and fertility crusader Miriam Cates and how political ideology affects the suggestions people like – or don’t like – to put forward for how to address this challenge. But it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge that two things can be true at once. One: there are specific economic barriers in the UK that make it harder for people who want to have (more) children to do so, and a government that is worried about that needs to look at structural ways to address it. Two: this isn’t just an economic challenge, and talking about Britain’s falling birth rate without recognising that we are not an anomaly misses a whole load of social and cultural factors.
In other words, there are good reasons for Phillipson to focus on improving the early years system – early investment is beneficial for parents, beneficial for children and beneficial for the society counting on those children growing up into healthy and productive adults. But it’s unlikely that doing so will lead to fuller primary school classrooms without some other pretty major changes.
We still have a week before most schools – and with them, parliament – return for the autumn term. MPs might want to think a bit more about this, and a bit less about minor shifts in GCSE results.
[See also: The age of unpopularity]
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