Cross border flows of primary pupils in London and Covid-19

One of the interesting things about education in London is quite how porous the flows of children are. Even at primary stage, 1 in 12 pupils in London not only doesn’t attend their closest school, but doesn’t even go to primary school in that borough.

This makes intuitive sense. A lot of London boroughs are very small and densely populated. And transport is very easy between boroughs (and indeed, free for young people). That means that travelling between boroughs is very straightforward and in practice, a family’s “local area” may well straddle two or more different boroughs so conceptually, they may not even recognise it as remarkable that, say, they live in Camden but their primary aged child goes to school in Islington or Hackney.

But this does make a difference when we’re looking at the announcement from the government that primary schools would shut in about 2/3 of London boroughs to stem the flow of Covid-19. A lot of commentary focussed on how these are slightly artificial borders for measuring different infection rates. But let’s look at some data — and particularly around how many primary pupils will be crossing from boroughs whose schools are shut (and hence have high infection rates) in order to carry on going to schools that are open in other boroughs.

Specifically, what I’ve looked at here is what is snappily termed the “cross border movement tables” published by the DFE in the “schools, pupils and their characteristics” sheet for 19/20.

This first table below (and sorry, in the interests of time I’ve just pasted raw Excel tables, rather than formatting them to look beautiful) shows that there 672k resident primary aged pupils in London boroughs attending state primary schools. Of those, 617k or 92% go to school in the same borough they are resident in, and 55k or 8% go out of borough. The % columns shows you how that varies between different boroughs.

The red and green highlighting shows which boroughs won’t be opening. The open boroughs have slightly more children actually being educated outside of borough, but it’s a marginal difference.

But the first key point is that 39,000 London primary children who live in closed boroughs, aren’t being educated there. In other words, they are moving across borders daily.

Importantly, though, a lot of them may not be moving cross border from next week, because their destination borough will also have primary schools closed.

So in order to estimate what cross border movement will still be taking place, we need to look at destination data. So in the table below I’ve shown the matrix of where children who live in closed boroughs, but are educated in open boroughs, are moving to and from. And that looks like this:

The way to read this table is that the columns are the boroughs who are open, and receiving pupils from boroughs that are closed. So for example, Camden is receiving a total of 701 primary children from closed boroughs (those coloured red, and with the number of pupils in the yellow highlighted cell). City of London is taking 162 and so on and so forth.

The other way to read it is to look at the exporting closed boroughs in red in the rows, and see where their children being educated are going. So we see that Barnet is exporting 1519 pupils to boroughs that are remaining open (the majority of which are going to Haringey).

Pleasingly for virus control, the majority of cross border primary aged children will not be moving borders, because their educating borough is also closed. But if you sum up the movements into open boroughs, from closed boroughs, we can estimate a total of 12,117 primary aged pupils will continue going to school in London every day from next week, even as they live in boroughs where the infection rate is considered too high for their own resident schools to be open.

Is that a lot of movement? Does that mean infection control is doomed? I have no idea. I just think it’s worth thinking about what is happening in practice.

Three main conclusions from this very quick piece of work:

1. London is very mobile. That means anything done on resident borders is more vulnerable here than anywhere else
2. Around 1 in 12 primary aged pupils are being educated out of borough — just over 55k young people. Of those, the majority (39,000) who normally cross borders daily are in boroughs whose own schools are being closed because of infection rates.
3. Of those 39k, the majority will not be moving — because their borough in which they are educated is also closed. Nevertheless, an estimated 12,000 primary aged pupils live in boroughs which are closed, but will be going to school in Monday in boroughs which remain open.

(Lots of caveats to this piece. For simplicity, I’ve stripped out cross border movements to non London boroughs, of which there’s a lot from some boroughs into Essex, Kent, Surrey and the like. I’ve also not accounted for the presence of key worker and vulnerable children, nor isolation bringing movement rates down, nor parents who keep their children off even when the schools will be open. So this shouldn’t be taken as anything more than an illustration).