The claim:

“Overcrowding soars to record level in primary and secondary schools” - headline in The Daily Mail

Background

This claim was one of many made in reports from the Telegraph and The Mail today concerning overcrowding in state schools.

The Telegraph led with the figure of “100,000 pupils crammed into overcrowded state schools”, and both newspapers went on to discuss apparent rises in the number of schools where pupil numbers exceeded capacity.

Taken together, these claims give the impression of a severe and worsening crisis in school overcrowding.

But do figures published last week by the Department for Education (DfE) really justify the bleak stories crafted from them by the press?

Analysis

The data comes from a report produced by DfE on school capacity, picked up over the weekend by the UK Press Association (PA). The report's two-paragraph introduction contains the following caution:

“The statistics are presented as emerging findings (based on provisional data). This is the first time that these statistics have been released as Official Statistics.”

In other words prior to the report's release last week, statistics compiled this way were not publicly available.

The fact that the only data provided here is from 2009 and 2010 renders the Mail's declaration that overcrowding has reached a “record level” rather meaningless.

And the notion that it has “soared” is perhaps even more tenuous.

Indeed, whether overcrowding can be judged to have increased at all depends on which measures are chosen for comparison.

The Telegraph's rounded figure of “100,000 pupils crammed into overcrowded state schools”, for instance, comes from a combination of primary and secondary pupils in excess of school capacity.

The exact total of 95,940 pupils is actually down from last year's 97,850 – overcrowding has very slightly worsened in primary schools, but eased in secondaries.

Similarly, the number of saturated (or over-saturated) schools has fallen at secondary level while rising at primary level.

The only way of arriving at “record levels” using figures reproduced in the Mail's report is by comparing the proportions of schools where capacity has been reached or exceeded.

It does not seem obvious that this specific measure should be used to gauge comparative levels of overcrowding.

But even if it was a universally accepted standard for comparison, the 0.5 per cent rate is hardly eagle-like.

The Daily Mail does seem to have extremely low standards for “soaring”: this is not the first semantic quibble that Full Fact has raised with the Mail over the use of this particular verb.

The Telegraph and the PA made less of supposed rises in overcrowding, painting a more static picture of the problems faced by over-subscribed schools.

It is not for Full Fact to judge whether their evaluation of the situation is fair, but without historic or international data for comparison, the significance of the DfE figures seems ambiguous.

So much for the numbers – what about the explanations offered in the press?

“Birth rate and immigration”, summarised the PA. The Mail and the Telegraph agreed.

Both have indeed been rising, and it is reasonable to suppose that these demographics put pressure on school places.

The data produced in the report itself, however, suggests another contributing factor: a decline in the overall number of schools.

Government statistics show that this decline has in fact been constant since at least 1978.

But during the last year the recorded fall may partially be deceptive, as a further caution from the DfE report's succinct, useful and apparently little-read introduction indicates:

“The figures exclude academies. The number of academies increased between 2009 and 2010 and this should be taken into account when making year on year comparisons.”

Roughly a quarter of the decrease in secondary school numbers is a result of the academies programme.

What effect this has on the proportion of overcrowded schools is unclear, but there is no evidence at all that any of the three press articles have taken the DfE's advice to account for academies in their comparisons.

Conclusion

This analysis leaves the claim we originally highlighted looking somewhat skeletal, if not technically inaccurate.

The same can be said, to a slightly lesser extent, for much press reporting of DfE figures: they have not exactly been misreported, but weightier conclusions have been hung on them than they can be justifiably expected to support.

The report does suggest that pupil numbers exceeding school capacity is a significant issue. On the other hand it also points to the much higher number of schools which have surplus places, a fact scarcely noted in the press.

But these inaugural statistics are so far only a snapshot and, without further context, conclusions reached from them should remain tentative.

Edgar Gerrard Hughes