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 Shirhan and Shakira Mohamud, both four, with a member of Courthope staff |
A short-term fix for primary places but future still uncertain
DON’T call it a new school... but this week, reception class children were filing in to newly-refurbished classrooms with newly-hired teachers in a newly-acquired school building in Gospel Oak.
The new facility is officially Camden Courthope Education Centre, so named because it is run directly by the council as an emergency response to a schools’ crisis that saw more than a hundred primary age children unplaced in May.
Under pressure from a vocal parents’ group campaign which accused them of a planning bungle in the north west of the borough, and left with nowhere to turn by the refusal of already crowded primary schools to admit extra classes, the Town Hall has hired, equipped and staffed the former church hall – Courthope Hall in Courthope Road – as a temporary ‘education centre’ for up to two years.
Leila Roy, whose son started at Courthope Hall on Tuesday, is acting as the head of the PTA until it has formal elections later this month.
“Educationally it is going to be amazing, though administratively it is something of a sham,” she says of the centre. “I have great hopes for that school though I feel that they did it [set it up] as a way to shut the parents up. But the centre inside looks amazing, and my son was very happy.”
There are 23 pupils starting this week and a further 19 in January; with 42 children in at least two classes.
New acting headmaster-style teacher-in-charge, Troy Sharpe, said: “Our first day went very smoothly.
“It is a very big day for both parents and children and it was important to us that we helped the children settle in and feel comfortable as quickly as possible.”
But the centre’s roots are in a demographic shift that became a crisis in May, when a growing group of parents in Belsize, West Hampstead and Kilburn were informed that there was no place for their four-year-olds in primary schools within an hour’s travel of their homes.
A campaign centred on Belsize – a ward with no primary schools at all – took aim at the council for failing to spot the ‘bulge’ in the population and at national policies which meant faith schools (40 per cent of Camden’s primaries) could exclude local children.
Dr Liz Taylor, who led the campaign after her son Jack was left unplaced, greeted the Courthope Road centre as a temporary solution but stressed that the long-term problem remains.
She said: “It is not brilliant because it is in the wrong place – it is not in the epicentre of the [places] problem – but it is better than nothing. It shows how great the need is for places in the north west of the borough.”
Political pressure on the Town Hall this summer was intense. At a public meeting in May, more than 150 parents crowded a Swiss Cottage hall to hear the council’s education chiefs explain the places shortage.
The meeting triggered a frantic round of negotiations between the council and existing primaries and the provisional order of portacabins before a parent’s suggestion that Courthope Hall – used as classrooms by private pre-prep school Hampstead Hill – might be available.
Lib Dem Belsize councillor Alexis Rowell, whose lobbying on the issue has angered some in the Town Hall, said: “If parents and ward councillors hadn’t run a campaign, nothing would have happened at all.”
The Town Hall has said the bulge in numbers was both London-wide and impossible to predict.
Camden’s head of schools, Cllr Andrew Mennear, said: “I think the Courthope centre will prove very successful at providing the class with a temporary home.
“However, we are still determined to find a permanent solution to the primary places shortage and will be working with the local community to investigate all the options.”
There remain outstanding issues. The cost of the centre has not been discussed but the hall in Courthope Road had to be leased at short notice from the Hampstead Hill preparatory school and completely refurbished, while staff including head Troy Sharpe were recruited with only weeks to discuss terms.
The future is also uncertain. Courthope Hall has been leased for two years, but the council is keen to put the Courthope children into mainstream primary schools as soon as possible.
A council press official says it is “currently in discussion with local primary schools with the aim of finding one school to take the whole class so that new friends and classmates can stay together”.
But the council spoke to seven primary schools in the area affected during the summer to see if they could take a ‘bulge’ class, and all refused, with governors citing shortage of space, the difficulty of recruiting staff, and the welfare of their existing pupils as reasons. It is not clear that anything has changed since then. |
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