Fertility Rates and The Recession

Of course if they can't afford to go out more "little accidents" may occur, if they spend more time occupying themselves with sex.
A side effect of recession,is that state school class numbers increase as kids are removed from private schools, when the cost get too much.

Your first point is an excellent one. I'm too old to really recall how that might work, though...

With respect to the private/public school argument though; the relative cost of private schools may stay about the same. Reduced demand for places forces them to lower their fees (theoretically) so they stay affordable enough for them to be filled. Alternatively, the number of places in private schools reduces proprtionately and fees stay high. If this happens there are more (good?) teachers available to the public system and the eductaion quality might rise.

Smaller private schools have been closing in greater numbers than new ones have been opening, in the UK.

Private schools are mostly not well off, and often quite close to making no profit at all.

There is not a lot of fat to cut in terms of lowering fees, so more will close over time and the trend of reduceing numbers is likely to accelerate: Therefore the state school sector is likely to have more pupils in future who would have perhaps gone to private fee charging schools if we were living in more economically optimistic times.

ATB from George

Interesting. I always made the naive assumption that private schools were wealthy. Even if there is a reduction in the number of schools, quality teachers may still be more availabile to children of a "small generation".

Dear Winky,

I still have a great friendship with the wife [now well into her eighties] of my Prep School Headmaster, who died some years ago now. The school closed as part of the current trend ...

Rates of pay for teachers have never been so very generous in all but the very most expensive private schools, and rather than teachers taking pay cuts even further, they tend to take their expertise to other areas.

There is not a pool of desperate teachers who will teach for even less in very small classes.

Perhaps the passing of many of these smaller private schools is not to be bemoaned. In reality they turned out people who are ill-fitted for the modern grab everything you can along the way kind of world that we have been living in since the nineteen eighties. They taught manners, self-reliance, respect for others, but often their accademic standards were no better than good state sector schools, as the focus was on preparing young men to fill the shoes of their fathers in small businesses.

The world has moved on from that slightly cozy, pre-globalised situation.

What is needed to compete in that open situation is no more being provided by the state sector than the private, but at least in the state sector the parents can sometimes afford to have extra tuition to guarantee that their children get good enough results to gain places in Univerity, which itself has become the main spring board for higher earning capacity, rather than necessarily the gentler human qualities that once characterised small business.

The world has changed, and some of us, educated in the old style find ourselves very much left behind in this change.

ATB from George

I would venture that fertility rates stay the same, maybe birth rates go up or down....

There are plenty of examples in nature where fertility rates vary with population density.

I remember a big black out in New York in the 60s or 70s, people had nothing to do for 24 hours, 9 months later there was a baby boom.

I can see in a few years time instead of headlines that there are too few school rooms there will be too many not filled.