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Danger of ignoring the concerns of parents and school governors
• IT is hard to believe that in two short years the current Tory/Lib Dem administration have squandered the enormous cache of goodwill that existed between Camden’s parents, governors and teaching staff.
Your article and comment (Governors – ‘We won’t be bullied’, Somers Town – where bad policies are easily buried, June 5) highlight what is just the latest example of political bullying in a process where the ends are said to justify the means. So often with this administration it is the weakest that suffer and the pupils of Edith Neville School are simply the latest to be targeted.
With my Labour colleagues I have been shocked by the clear exasperation of parents and governors that has led to an unprecedented number of complaints and deputations about these policies.
Nobody can deny that there is a need for additional secondary school places in Camden, not the least in the south of the borough, but achieving this in a politically expedient time frame has targeted first Frank Barnes School, whose pupils were set to be speedily whipped out of the borough and now Edith Neville School, who have serious and justified concerns about colocating another school alongside their already disadvantaged pupils.
We can only guess at the problems waiting in the wings of the decision to expand the already large Camden Community School by two forms of entry and still there is no sign of any will to resolve the lack of school places south of the Euston Road, despite offers of help from the government. If the wards in the south were the electoral heartlands of this administration I am sure the strength of their arguments would have won out by now.
The scrutiny committee working group only came into being because of the outcry at the proposed erasure of a nationally renowned school for deaf children. Eventually colocation with another Camden primary school was accepted, but again the options presented were few and it is hard to accept there is no alternative.
It is not too late to step back and go out to meaningful consultation with parents and governors in the borough to find a welcomed alternative. The government has made it clear that a delay to the opening of an academy in Camden will not jeopardise the Building Schools for the Future programme, but ignoring the concerns of parents and governors certainly will jeopardise the esteem in which Camden education has been held for many years.
CLLR HEATHER JOHNSON
Labour Chair Children, Schools and Families Scrutiny Committee
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