A city is only as successful as the company it keeps

I am a school governor in an inner London school. With the end of the school year comes the natural turnover of teachers and staff leaving their jobs and new ones being recruited, although that second part is easier said than done.

“We’re struggling to recruit,” admits the headteacher – and little wonder when even the decent salary on offer is not enough to compensate from the expense of living in London, a city that loses its shine when you don’t have the money to enjoy it.

How does this link to the built environment?

To keep the city running you need all the cogs turning. It’s great to have a capital city with the best brains in banking, global leaders in tech and lawyers galore – but who’s going to clean the streets, serve the food and work in the administration departments?

A successful city is more than the sum of its parts and, frankly, London is currently less.

I recently sat down with peers working in councils across London, both elected and staff. It’s nothing new to say that governments of all sizes and shapes work in silos, but this is now to the detriment to the success of the city. The built environment isn’t just about property, it’s about creating the setting for human activities from parks to buildings, transport to energy, everything BE News endeavours to cover.

The teams responsible for business and enterprise aren’t speaking to those in education, who aren’t speaking to those in housing. If this isn’t happening in local government, it certainly isn’t happening centrally.

The teaching crisis has highlighted the need for this discussion. In London, the average income for a teacher is £36,775 per year and for a teaching assistant £24,570. Monthly take-home pay after tax works out at £2,419 and £1,728 respectively. Yet, to rent a room in London is an average of £952 a month according to Spareroom – and this varies drastically depending on the postcode.

As a parent of two children living in inner London, I find that school gate discussions regularly turn to who’s moving next and to where. There is also anxiety over decreasing classroom sizes and high staff – also a worry for pupils.

So, do families move out?

London is haemorrhaging families. We saw it in the pandemic, and now, the high cost of housing is driving those out who wanted to stay – whether through rising rents or the huge cost of upsizing.

We need to tackle this problem urgently and do more to make it financially viable for teachers, teaching assistants – and pupils and their families – to live in London. If we don’t, it won’t just be the teaching sector that finds itself in crisis.