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Don’t block expansion
• I AM rather indignant that the Where is My School? campaign (whose objective of a new secondary school south of the Euston Road I support) should have diverted its attentions to opposing the expansion of South Camden Community School, which is a valuable part of the £200 million Building Schools for the Future programme backed by the government in Camden.
It has, sadly, been joined in this miserable undertaking by our MP, Frank Dobson. It is sad to see Mr Dobson, a former chair of governors at the school, publicly claiming to know better what is good for the school than its headteacher, Rosemary Leeke. He does it, of course, because he cannot bear to see Labour government education policies being effectively implemented by a Liberal Democrat-led Camden administration.
Simon Wroe’s report (School could take more students, March 27), also cast doubt on a message circulated by the Where is My School? campaign, which claimed: “Those who came to the meeting (residents, governors, parents) were unanimous that… the expansion was not in the school’s best interests.”
Ms Leeke, by contrast, is reported as saying she knows that expansion of her school can be made to work. Are we to suppose that the headteacher is wilfully working against her school’s best interests?
In fact the consultation meeting referred to, on March 25, was attended by only about a dozen people, and three-quarters of them were Where is My School? campaigners. It is disingenuous for the campaigners to have so misrepresented the nature of the meeting to their supporters, and to have completely failed to mention the headteacher’s support for the expansion which they oppose.
At present only half the borough’s children can get into its secondary schools, so there is unlikely to be a shortage of takers.
As your paper told us (front page, March 13) secretary of state Ed Balls has promised to fund a new secondary school south of the Euston Road in addition to the present BSF funding already agreed.
Instead of trying to strangle the bird in our hand Mr Dobson and the Where is My School? campaigners should be concentrating their attention on catching that other much-needed bird which is still in the bush.
Their job is not to block expansion at SCCS. It is to hold Mr Balls to his promise as well as a bigger and better SCCS.
ROBIN YOUNG
Bedford Avenue, WC1 |
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