A new district is usually approved with a school marked on the plan.
The building is delivered late in the , after several thousand families have moved in.
The reason is financial rather than administrative.
A developer's revenue arrives with the flats, and a school produces none.
negotiated at approval are frequently renegotiated once construction has started and the political cost of stopping is high.
Families arriving in the meantime travel to schools in older districts, which become crowded.
The is recorded as a problem of those districts rather than of the new development.
Sequencing rules solve this and are administratively simple.
for the later phases are withheld until the school opens.
Where such rules exist, schools are delivered early, because the developer's own cash flow now depends on them.
Location within the district matters more than most plans acknowledge.
A school on the edge, reachable only by a main road, produces a school run by car and a morning.
The same building in the centre, reachable on foot, changes the traffic of the whole district.
Playgrounds and halls that open to the public outside school hours double the use of a public at almost no cost.
Few designs allow it, because a building shared after four o'clock needs a separate entrance that nobody drew.