By Carole Dennett
I’m hugely saddened by the closure of my Island primary school – but unfettered greenfield housebuilding is not the answer to saving our rural communities.
All three of the Island schools I attended – Yarmouth Primary, Nodehill Middle and Carisbrooke High – have now closed, but it’s the closure of Yarmouth that saddens me most. From the joy of learning to swim in Yarmouth’s freezing outdoor pool to our weekly visits to St James’s Church (a practice now, sadly, dropped by many CofE schools), Yarmouth School, in the 1990s, truly was a happy place. The confidence and love of learning fostered at Yarmouth ultimately allowed me to study at Oxford and embark on the finance career that’s taken me across the world. Now, with two young children of my own, I feel great regret that pupils will never again benefit from what Yarmouth gave me.
Whilst Yarmouth’s fate may now be sealed, the future of many other much-loved Island primary schools currently hangs in the balance. Just last week four Island Primary schools (Barton, Broadlea, Carisbrooke and Godshill) had their Pupil Admission Numbers cut by 52, reflecting a further reduction in school-age children on the Island.
What can be done to halt this decline? Developers would have us believe the solution is simple – build more houses. Nimbys, they argue, are stifling development and stopping young families from getting onto the housing ladder. If only we met government housing targets, the developers say, we could keep our schools and communities alive.
But the evidence doesn’t support this – these targets are premised on the Island’s population growing from 138,000 in 2011 to over 157,000 by 2036 – good news for Island schools, you might think. But dig a little deeper, and you realise what government actually wants us to build for is exclusively retirees moving to the Island. Underlying their population projections is a growth of the over-65 Island population of over 20,000, and a decline in all other age groups, including school-age children.
If we follow this plan, by 2036, 50 per cent of the Island’s population will be over 55, leaving us one of the least balanced communities in the country. Despite building thousands of new homes on green fields, there’ll be fewer school-age children living here in 2036 than today.
Balancing our communities, and keeping schools open, is a complex challenge, but part of the solution lies in job, not housing, creation. In 2001, 55,000 people living on the Island were in work; by 2011 this had fallen to 46,000.
Why is the working-age population (who, typically, are parents) leaving the Island? Again, housing is not the primary issue – 11 out of the top 15 areas in which working-age people are leaving the Island have less affordable housing than here. They are leaving the Island because we simply don’t have the number of highly skilled jobs we need. The post-Covid boom in remote working represents a golden opportunity for us to change this. It’s attracting high-paying, tech-enabled jobs that will reverse the decline in the Island’s working-age population.
And the best part? It’s the unique outdoor lifestyle and beautiful landscapes we can offer that will be a big part of the draw to this newly-mobile workforce – and to concrete over our countryside would be pure self-defeating folly.