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 Emma Jones, far left, and Cllr Andrew Mennear square up on Monday night |
School campaigners in education chief ambush
They corner him and point out Mount Pleasant sorting office
PARENTS cornered Camden’s education chief in a Town Hall corridor on Monday night, firing him with demands to open a new school south of the Euston Road.
Backed up against a marble pillar and surrounded by angry mothers and fathers, Conservative councillor Andrew Mennear was repeatedly asked why the Town Hall had passed up on the chance to develop the Mount Pleasant post office site in the Clerkenwell tip of Camden.
Campaigners argued that a new school could be accommodated on the site if council chiefs used planning permission laws to demand one when developers begin sizing up the land next year.
Instead, the Town Hall plans to use the government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) funding programme to open a new school in Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage.
Cllr Mennear said: “It is inevitable that we had to look at cost. The Swiss Cottage is the only site that meets the requirements on cost, size and whether it can be delivered on time.”
But with children cheering from the public gallery, parents led a deputation in front of all of Camden’s councillors before ambushing Cllr Mennear outside the main chamber.
Emma Jones, one of the campaign’s leading organisers, said: “It is easy to find blame for the chronic lack of provision. So far we’ve been told it’s the fault of central government, the previous administration and Ken Livingstone. But we are not interested in blame. We are interested in solutions.”
Protesters handed in a 2,000-name petition and mapped out the problem on an overhead projector with graphs that showed the wards south of the Euston Road completely isolated in the scramble for school places.
Ms Jones said: “We have no local school, Camden or otherwise.”
Campaigners claimed the new Swiss Cottage school will not solve the school place problem where it is at its most critical – arguing that the chosen area was already served by Haverstock School in Chalk Farm and Quintin Kynaston School just over the Westminster border in Swiss Cottage. The focus should be, they say, on finding a school in the south – specifically the old Mount Pleasant sorting office.
Ms Jones said: “One of the sites in our area big enough for a school but dismissed by the BSF report as too expensive is the Post Office site at Mount Pleasant.
“We have just heard that the post office will begin public consultation early next year. They want to build 600 housing units on this Camden brown field site, with a further 900 or more on their Islington site across the road. This could mean another 2,000 local children with no school.”
Cllr Mennear has already admitted he accepts that the south of the borough needs another school – but has claimed it can’t be built without even more funding, above the £200 million on offer through BSF.
Instead, the council are trying to deal with the problem in the south by adding more school places at South Camden Community School in Somers Town and possibly opening up Maria Fidelis – also in Somers Town – to both boys and girls. The latter currently only admits girls.
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