Following on from the meeting at the FBC centre earlier in August a number of members of AG-RAG with children who will be coming up to secondary school age have been discussing the issues raised.
Firstly, the council still gave no guarantee of a school, what they said was:
- By 2017 they predict that the number of children needing a secondary school place will exceed the supply of places available.
- At that point the council is required to ensure provision of additional school capacity.
- They can provide that either by building a new school or by finding extra capacity in other local schools.
- The council currently does not have the money to build a new school, nor is their preferred site on the Arborfield Garrison SDL available.
If we look back, Wokingham Borough Council have been promising a new secondary school to residents of Finchampstead for over ten years, and have failed to deliver it. Over a number of years there has also been a shortage of primary school places which the council addressed by adding bulge classes to various local schools – new primary schools were only built this year.
In order to build a new school in 2017 in Arborfield the council has to both get enough money together, and the developers have to clear the site and provide it to the council in good time for a school to be built ready to open.
As a new build school the buildings will be subject to the governments new, lower cost standards for school buildings will be followed, and the rest of the Arborfield Garrison housing development will go on around the new school.
Putting those points aside, even before 2017 parents in the parishes south of Wokingham will have increasing difficulty getting their children into their chosen schools. The standard tie breaker when deciding on school places in the borough is by distance, and with no secondary school in the south, parents in the parishes of Finchampstead and Arborfield lose a lot of the time, as a result they get allocated spare places elsewhere in the borough in schools like Bulmershe, or they have to send their children over the border to schools in Hampshire. As the years go on, and free capacity in the secondary system reduces this is only going to get worse.
Looking at all of those points, to those members with children it seemed there was a lot of uncertainty in the council plan, and that even if they managed to build a school, a building site wouldn’t be the kind of location we would like to see our children educated. As such it seemed the only real option to get some certainty over what might happen was to explore the free school option.
The main advantages of a free school are firstly it would get access to money that wouldn’t usually be available if the council were to build a school. Secondly a free school has lower requirements to be allowed to be built – a free school only has to show a demand, not a need – i.e. there is a demand for a school in the southern parish, whereas the need for a school in the south would be established by looking at the availability of school spaces across the whole borough.
As a result we have made the first moves towards forming a committee to lead a free school bid. Currently there is a Facebook discussion group looking at the issues, and most importantly a petition running to establish the demand for a school in the southern parishes. Given that the proposed school site won’t be available until 2017 at the earliest, and building work around the site will be ongoing we are also exploring other sites that could accommodate the school so the children are not being educated on a building site – a suggestion that has been put forward several times for a local site that would be of the size needed, and would be available with relatively little adaptation is the current officers mess at West Court that is to be vacated and sold along with the rest of the Garrison. Any other suggestions would be most welcome.
So what do we need to do:
Firstly whilst parents around here know there is a demand we need to establish it so
- If you are a parent in one of the southern parishes and want to see a new school of any sort in this part of the borough please sign the petition.
- If you know anybody who is a parent, please ask them to sign the petition.
- If you have contacts in local primary schools, please pass on details and ask them to get their parents to sign the petition.
Please be aware that signing the petition is in no way saying that you will send your children to the school, nor does it guarantee your child a place should the school be opened, it is only there to allow us to show the Department of Education that the demand for a school is there.
Secondly, if you feel you can offer more time to help shape the vision for the school, please volunteer using our contact page linked above. Whilst there are experts in the field who can help us, fundamentally this has to be a parent led project. Involvement in this stage of the process does not mean that you are making a long term commitment once the school has opened, however if the free school group so decides there is some possibility of a limited ability to allocate places at the school to founders children outside the normal admissions process.
We are currently setting up a separate web site for the free school group, along with discussion forums, and we will publish details of those once it is up and running.
