Wandsworth’s newest primary school closure becomes final today, and the borough’s own numbers show the pressure behind it has deepened since we first mapped it out last October, spreading for the first time into secondary schools.
Oasis Academy Putney, on Putney Lower Common, shut its doors for good yesterday, 31 August. The Secretary of State for Education confirmed the closure in July, moving it beyond the “in principle” status reported in May. It is the fifth Wandsworth primary school to close since 2023, following Broadwater, Christchurch, St Anne’s and Goldfinch.
The pattern behind all five is the demographic swap we identified last October: Wandsworth’s state schools are losing pupils faster than the system can absorb the loss, while the children who remain are increasingly likely to be eligible for free school meals.
The borough’s state-funded school roll has fallen every year since 2019/20, down 8.9% to 27,231 pupils, according to Department for Education census data published in June.
What has changed since October is where that pressure now shows up. Secondary school free-school-meal eligibility overtook primary’s for the first time around 2021/22, and the gap has kept widening.
By 2025/26, 39.5% of Wandsworth secondary pupils were eligible for free school meals against 29.9% of primary pupils, nearly a 10-point gap. Five years earlier the two phases were roughly level, at 20.6% and 19.2%. Nationally, free school meal eligibility rose too, to 26.5%, with London’s 1.3-point regional rise the largest in the country.
Does VAT on private school fees change anything?
Readers have asked directly whether VAT on independent school fees, in force since January 2025, might ease the pressure by pushing families from private into state schools. Wandsworth’s own admissions data gives a direct answer: on the evidence the council has disclosed, that is not visibly happening in Putney.
The finding comes from a freedom of information request the council answered back in March 2025. It shows that across the whole borough, 45 of the 1,411 children starting a state school place in 2024, 3.2%, had moved from a fee-paying school. In the first seven weeks of 2025, that was 11 of 230 starters, 4.8%.
Wandsworth doesn’t disclose any pupil numbers small enough to risk identifying an individual child, rather than publish it. Putney.news cross-checked every school in that dataset against Wandsworth’s ward map. Every one of the 29 schools across Putney’s seven wards falls into that blacked-out category, in both periods. Not a single Putney school records a fee-paying-to-state transfer large enough to escape redaction.
That does not prove nothing happened but it does mean any movements were too small for the council to publish.
Elsewhere in the borough, the numbers were large enough to escape redaction. Belleville Primary, in Northcote ward in Battersea, recorded ten fee-paying transfers in 2024 alone, unredacted, close to a quarter of the entire borough’s total that year.
Council officers, in their own planning papers, list “independent school places” as a factor their pupil forecasting cannot reliably measure, while still projecting continued roll decline across the rest of the decade. In other words: the council does not think the VAT effect is large enough to change the trajectory.
One local example cuts the other way. West Putney’s own Falcons School closed last summer after 70 years, citing VAT alongside National Insurance and minimum wage rises. That is a private school failing under the same cost pressures state schools are meant to be gaining pupils from, not evidence of families moving between them.
The comparison is not exact. Wandsworth’s FOI figures cover only 2024 and the first seven weeks of 2025, and the council has not been asked for anything more recent. A second, wider request covering the rest of 2025 and 2026 to date is now being prepared.
The council’s own history with school buildings adds an unplanned footnote. When St Anne’s Primary closed in 2025, the council bid to use the site for special educational needs provision, an increasingly stretched service in its own right. It lost.
The site went to an independent school instead, awarded by the Southwark Church of England Diocesan Education Board, which owned the land. A borough haemorrhaging state school places lost a bid for its own former school to the same private sector some readers had hoped VAT would shrink.
What you can do
The Wandsworth Schools Forum, where the council’s own pupil projections and closures are set out in public papers, next meets on 12 October 2026. Families with questions about a specific school’s future, or about SEND places, can raise them with their ward councillor; find yours via wandsworth.gov.uk/the-council/councillors.
Putney.news is preparing a further freedom of information request for 2025 and 2026 admissions figures, to get a fuller picture.
