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We need a more radical approach
• I WAS encouraged to read in your paper that, once again, a meeting to showcase plans for a secondary school in Adelaide Road have been transformed into a venue for democratic debate, with the audience vociferously demanding to know why the school is not to be sited south of the Euston Road (Academy Backers: We wanted a school south of Euston Road, September 6).
Public feeling demands that the council, and the officers who serve it, must be held accountable for their half-hearted ‘research’ into potential sites south of the Euston Road (which seems to have consisted of a few phone calls to the estate manager for UCH), and the travesty of their consultation on their Building Schools for the Future plans, which was very poorly publicised and sidestepped the issue of where a school is most needed.
The ‘Where is my school?’ campaign is now two years old. After three months of campaigning, Richard Lewin took over as assistant director of finance and support to schools.
At first he seemed enthusiastic about researching the campaign’s assertion that not only was the area south of the Euston Road the area in Camden where children found it hardest to find a school place, but also that it was an area where some of the children most deprived of opportunity and resources lived.
It is also an area of ethnic, religious and economic diversity that would benefit from measures to promote social cohesion. In other words, the perfect place to site a secondary school.
Two years later, no work has been done. The reason for this is simple – officers only do research that the administration calls for, and the administration know such research would prove that their decision to ignore calls to build a school south of the Euston Road amounts to neglect of some of their most disadvantaged residents, and a misguided use of government money.
The decision to promote a school in Adelaide Road (hardly the area in the borough most in need of resources) was made for reasons of expediency, and in the hope of an easy public relations coup.
It has backfired on the council leaders and now it appears it has backfired on University College London.
The administration are wrong, and people are waking up to the fact.
University College, as a body concerned for education, must put its weight behind the growing body of public opinion in the community that surrounds it.
A more radical and energetic approach should be taken in creating the school everyone agrees is urgently needed.
MARTIN JONES
Millman Street, WC1
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