Education and sustainable schools' strategy: July 2025

Introduction

As a council we are currently reviewing our education policy and strategic programme, in light of changing legislation and demographics.

We've already has some early conversations with school and academy leaders, to help shape this, and we are now taking a report to our Children, Families and Communities Select Committee as we start to more formally develop our policy. This report will be published later today (Thursday 3 July) and a further report will then go to our Cabinet over the summer.

Our collective ambition is for Norfolk to be a county where every child can flourish. To achieve this, we need to ensure all children in the county can access a high-quality education. We know that this is a vision shared by schools and academies, and one that we can only achieve by working together.

However, we are acutely aware of the challenges facing the education system in our county, particularly given the rural nature of Norfolk.

Across Norfolk, as in many parts of the country, we are experiencing a sustained decline in the school-age population. This demographic shift is already impacting school admissions and catchment dynamics, and it is clear that the current landscape of schools will need to evolve to remain sustainable and effective. While this presents challenges, it also offers an opportunity to strengthen our school system for the future.

Primary schools are already being affected by falling rolls and the downward trend in the number of children joining reception is set to continue. We have already started working with several schools to help them adapt and manage the impact of this, but we now need to develop a longer-term strategy to ensure children in the county can receive the very best education.

As a council, we recognise small schools as an essential and valued part of the education landscape, particularly in rural parts of Norfolk. We expect the changing demographics to affect both urban and rural schools, but the impact is likely to felt more quickly in some of our smaller schools.

We expect most schools will need to change in some way, with some mergers, federations and possible closures as well as changes to pupil admissions numbers or catchment areas. We think the best approach will be for education leaders to consider these options together in dialogue with the local authority and we are seeking a collaborative approach to do what we can to secure a strong, sustainable school landscape that delivers local education for communities.  This will be difficult, and we can only achieve the best outcomes for our children by working together. We are grateful to those schools and trusts that have already helped shaped our thinking.

Context  

The number of children in the education system in the county is expected to fall from a peak of nearly 10,000 in the current year 8, to fewer than 7,000 in the 2027 reception intake.

The graph below reflects the numbers in each cohort in September 2024. Of our 46 planning areas, 25 are experiencing a decline in pupil numbers and have several small schools.

The role of the County Council

In response to changing demographics and new legislation, the council is currently refreshing its policy framework. As mentioned above, this is currently going through our governance processes, with an initial report to the Children, Families and Communities Select Committee on July 11 and then a fuller policy paper expected to be seen at Cabinet later in the year. 

We see Children's Services roles in education as primarily being: 

• Champion of all children - including provision for vulnerable groups in education
• Convener of the system - facilitation role to bring the system together
• Supporter of collaboration - towards a self-improving system
• Infrastructure - creating the conditions in which education can thrive
• Intelligence leader - using data to inform the system on the above

In relation to the 'sustainable schools' agenda we would therefore position our role as using data to highlight the issues and our convening power to hopefully facilitate the right conversations between education leaders to manage this challenge together - honest brokers but not dictators of solutions.

Next steps

We have already started some engagement with school and academy leaders to begin to form our strategy. We plan to work in each of the 46 planning areas, bringing together education leaders in those areas to look at what the data is telling us and begin to come up with some solutions.

The LA will not propose a solution - but will try to provide the right information to all partners (including school leaders, MATs and the Diocese) to convene the right conversations.

We believe local planning areas are the most sensible geographies to focus such conversations.

We have risk assessed these areas to identify those with the most acute issue from falling rolls and will prioritise those facing the most acute fall in numbers.  We will also be providing data on each school based on a wide range of factors (such as quality, outcomes, catchment forecast, the SEND offer and forecast rolls) to help inform these conversations and to help highlight where we collectively need to focus attention.

These conversations will begin as a full programme from September onwards and you can therefore expect that representatives from your school or trust will receive an invite at some stage next academic year. As highlighted above, the issue of falling rolls affects all parts of the county and so we want to have a dialogue in all the geographical areas - we will therefore be really grateful for positive engagement from school leaders when these invitations come through. We will keep you up to date as this progresses.