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 Controversial: The Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage, schools site where a city academy could be built.
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Behind the discreet silences, is a city academy plan being hatched?
HOWEVER many times you ask it, however you structure the question, whatever the situation, the answer will always be the same.
Ask Andrew Mennear – the council’s education chief – whether he is on the brink of signing Camden’s new school project off down the controversial city academy route of private sponsorship and he will wrinkle his nose, shrug his shoulders and tell you he can’t say anything.
Stop him in a town hall corridor, try to catch him off guard, challenge him at a public meeting and the Conservative councillor shows why he has become adept at not answering the question.
“We have not reached any conclusions yet,” Councillor Mennear will tell you. “We are still listening to people. We will take all views into account.”
What he is asking parents and school governors to believe is that education chiefs, after months of planning, have not reached a decision on whether private sponsorship should be used in their plans to open a secondary school in Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage.
Yet, department officials are due to start writing a final report on Monday, a key advisory document which could pave the way for Camden’s first city academy. Few governors believe such critical work would begin without a strong steer from Cllr Mennear, and his sidekick, Councillor John Bryant, the Lib Dem member holding the less significant children’s portfolio.
There is growing suspicion that senior figures at the town hall want University College London to follow up its initial interest to work with Camden on creating what they would see as a “flagship” academy, probably with an emphasis on sciences, which they think could be the envy of other London boroughs.
Nobody at the council will say it publicly – they don’t want to appear to be sidelining a rival sponsorship bid from the Church of England at a critical stage – but if UCL, with its academic reputation, could be promoted as a sponsor then it could undercut the campaign against city academies.
Even councillors who are opposed to city academies ideologically on the grounds that they let sponsors gain control of admissions and expulsions have adopted an attitude that, if Camden must have one, it would be better to have a sponsor like UCL. The university is not commenting but has had several high-level meetings with the council.
Senior civil servants have privately talked enthusiastically about how work on the new school could be underway by this autumn if it goes down the academy route, while at the same time speaking disparagingly about how long it would take to stage an open competition and to canvass for a community school.
Cllr Mennear, however silent he stays on the issue, can’t dodge the issue for ever and must face his cabinet colleagues at the end of next month for a meeting in which he says plans will be “beaten out”.
He may find it a harder challenge to shake off protesters who are calling for a fair competition in which the council would be pressured to enter its own bid to run a community school in the same manner that it manages all its existing secondaries.
Significantly, Labour councillors have rumbled Cllr Mennear’s claim that a city academy in Camden would be rewarded financially by the government.
They describe paperwork that accompanied a consultation programme as “fiction” – allegations that verge on accusing the council of lying to parents.
Cllr Mennear has in recent days tried to retreat from the information that was circulated at the end of last year when Camden joined the government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) spending programme.
He has even publicly thanked Labour for the extra homework it has done on the scheme – albeit through gritted teeth.
He has not explained who in the town hall was responsible for the mistaken briefing.
It is through BSF that Camden will scoop £200 million to build the new school and refurbish existing secondaries.
Camden’s briefing document to parents and governors said: “The DfES is expected to put Camden under significant pressure for the new school to be an academy. There are likely to be significant financial advantages if this were the case. It is likely that if the new school were an academy then 100 per cent of the capital costs could be met by the BSF programme.”
Education secretary Alan Johnson has contradicted that claim.
He said: “The local authority will receive funding based on the number of pupil places at the new school; the governance arrangements of the new school, whether an academy or determined through a competition, will not affect the level of funding.”
Labour councillor Geethika Jayatilaka said: “This particular piece of Lib Dem-Conservative literature has been shown to be nothing more than a work of fiction.
If they had bothered to check with the Department for Education and Skills they would have found that the borough will receive the same level of funding regardless of what type of new secondary school is built.”
Cllr Mennear has looked rather sheepish when challenged on this subject by Labour members and the Campaign for State Education, currently being spearheaded at meetings by former councillor Lucy Anderson and Fiona Millar, the education journalist.
His response: “The council has been raising detailed questions on the issue with the DfES to clarify the matter.”
The climbdown has been seen as a minor victory for the opposition benches but, if their intention is to stop a city academy opening in Camden, the war is still to be won. |
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