|
|
 |
| |
Only one site for a new school
School’s chief Cllr Andrew Mennear explains why Adelaide Road was chosen as the site for a new school
GIVEN a clean sheet of paper, and the ability to redesign the borough of Camden from scratch, one of the first things everyone would do would be to space out our secondary schools so that all our families have the chance to send their children to a local school.
Currently, only 47 per cent of Camden's 11-16 year olds have places at Camden secondaries. Of course, some families prefer to send their children to independent schools and a number choose a school in another borough, but I am firmly convinced that far more than 47 per cent of families would prefer their children to be educated in Camden’s schools if they thought they stood a chance of getting into them.
There have been two campaigns for a new secondary school – one south of the Euston Road and another in the north of the borough.
Going canvassing in Camden at the borough elections, this was a major issue throughout the west, north and south of Camden.
It was also an issue which both the Conservatives and Lib Dems placed high up in their manifestos and so it was easy for Camden’s new LibDem-Conservative Partnership Administration to agree to prioritise investigating the case for at least one new secondary school in Camden.
The government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme allowed us the opportunity to look at this issue seriously.
But, as stated above, we didn't have a clean sheet of paper with which to start work, nor did we have the timescale we might have wished.
The government only published its guidance to us in late June and said we needed to submit our draft bid for additional places and finance by October 13.
Cllr John Bryant (the Executive Member for Children) and I asked officers to look at all sites that had been suggested by campaigners.
We asked them to do a thorough trawl of all council-owned land and premises, examining the break-point of leases, and to look at all potential development sites in the borough.
No part of the borough was ever competing with another part of the borough for a new school. What individual sites were competing against were:
• Affordability (the cost of acquiring a non-council-owned site is not covered by BSF);
• Availability of the site within the BSF timeframe (we need to prove in November 2007 to the government that it is possible for us to redevelop a site on the BSF timescale);
n Size (the government wants new secondary school sites to be at least 9,000 square metres).
We asked officers to look again at the guidance, to re-examine how small it would be possible to make a new secondary school, and to see whether we could have a school on split sites. We asked if year 7 buildings (taken as the reference for admissions ‘as the crow flies’) could be moved to more central locations in Camden. We even asked if it was possible for us to use academies as a way of insisting that 10 per cent of pupils had to come from particular locations in the borough. None of these challenges were successful.
Only one site met all the government criteria for a new school – the Adelaide Road site.
It is my fervent hope that a future government will look again at the criteria for new schools.
Smaller secondaries work in Scandinavia and they could work here. There will be more and more development in Camden and the Mayor of London must address the shortage of schools as well as the shortage of affordable housing.
But, in the meantime, Adelaide Road plus a two-form entry expansion of South Camden Community School, together with Maria Fidelis agreeing to accept boys as well as Catholic girls, was the best option open to us.
|
| |
|
|
|
