This week we had another Arborfield Community Forum, held this time in the old Arborfield Garrison Community Centre, now being managed as the Arborfield Green Community Centre by Crest Nicholson.
Unlike some community forums in the past there weren’t any new announcements, but it did provide a good way to see a lot of the players building the Arborfield Strategic Development Location together in one place, as so often they will present whatever new development or plan they are putting forward in isolation.
Crest of course were there, and for a number of people the main topic of conversation was the development going on on the public open space they had fenced off and sold on to Westbuild Homes where the church car park used to be. Particular concerns were the absolute eye sore the developers had created digging a balancing pond in what was supposed to be retained public open space, and also that the night before the site had not stopped working at 6pm as they were supposed to. Crest have already taken Westbuild Homes to task over the late working, ironically for one of the most controversial parts of the development the site had bitten back and the reason for the late working was their drilling rig had got stuck, indeed you could see the drill stuck in the same spot for several days this week. With regards to the balancing pond with the current hot weather we’re stuck with it looking a mess for a while at least as any attempt to turf it or seed it at this point wouldn’t take. Crest were also presenting the plans for more blocks of flats for the rental market on a site next to the Bohunt School access road.
Moving on to the other large developer on site, back in March Legal and General the new owners of the southern part of the development went out to consultation on changing the agreed design and layout, and they were at the Community Forum presenting these new plans again. Much as when Crest took over the northern part this is really just a rearrangement rather than any major changes, so the second primary school on the site has been relocated to a more central location, and the employment area has been moved too. There is also a change to the routing of the Nine Mile Ride extension which may well serve to lower its attractiveness as a cut through.
There was also representation from Millgate Homes who have bought the parcel of land on the Rowcroft Barracks Princess Marina Drive directly adjacent to the Community Centre and St Eligius Community Church. This is going to be a small development of houses, with a block of apartments.
From the council there were two displays, the first was for what has provisionally been named Arborfield Primary School – although I’m sure it has been pointed out that it is in Barkham! This will initially be a two form entry school with provision for it to subsequently expand to three form entry as Arborfield Green is built out and with the plans for the Barkham Square extension to the development. Site wise it will be based around what was the third rugby pitch behind the wire on Biggs Lane.
The other council display was about the upcoming Arborfield Relief Road – the plans for this have been pretty stable for a number of months, but the more interesting part was the ongoing discussion over speed limits. As you may be aware there is currently a temporary 40mph speed limit from the Poperinghe Way roundabout down to the Church Road turn up to Farley Hill. This was always planned to be made permanent, indeed the Nine Mile Ride Extension Roundabout was designed and built for traffic to take it at 40mph. However the map the council had on display highlighted that Thames Valley Police had objected to the speed limit being cut to 40mph, so the council had a new plan that once the Arborfield Relief Road is open regularises the speed limit along the length of the A327 from the edge of Finchampstead to the Shinfield Science Park to 50mph. This involves cutting the limit from 60mph in some places and raising the 40mph in others, most notably past Poperinghe Way and the current pedestrian crossing before the new relief road splits off. In general having a consistent limit seems like a good idea rather than the current limits that change up and down, however we do think the council needs to look carefully at the crossing by Poperinghe Way as we know people already have experience of traffic on the A327 not stopping at those lights, so much as with the new Relief Road where the footpath is being put on a bridge, an alternative to a road level crossing needs to be considered.
The other talking point locally is the very visible campaign by Barkham Parish Council petitioning against the Barkham Square development, which can be found here. What the council is actually petitioning for is to force a discussion in council over “unsustainable development in Barkham”. But that is all the petition is for – Wokingham Borough Council can quite happily have the discussion, and then do absolutely nothing. It’s worth highlighting that the same arguments about sustainability are being made by the campaigns against the other locations being talked about for the next phase of housing, which are development on green belt land around Twyford and Ruscombe, and the 10,000 home development on rural Grazeley near junction 11 of the M4. As we have said previously, Barkham Square is the least controversial site under discussion, as it is an expansion of the existing Arborfield Green development, but early enough that the schools and district centre can be build for 4,500 homes rather than the planned 3,500. The main argument against it is that it will bring the Arborfield Green boundary very close to Barkham Village, and this is a separate settlement from Arborfield Green, but Barkham have rather neutered their own argument by having now moved their parish council offices out of Barkham Village into Arborfield Green, and very prominently argued that the 1,800 houses of the 3,500 on Arborfield Green being built in Barkham are part of Barkham through school naming arguments, arguments over the name of Arborfield Green as a whole, and the new very obvious big green signs marking the boundary of Barkham.
Unfortunately, being realistic it is almost inevitable that we will get more houses around Arborfield Green. The pressure for houses is coming from Westminster, not Wokingham. The council uses two basic criteria for establishing development locations, firstly brownfield sites, which was the basis on which Arborfield Garrison was selected as the largest development last time around, or secondly expanding existing settlements which was the basis of the Wokingham North and South strategic development locations, and the South of M4 location. Arborfield Green now has become an established development that can be expanded, and is especially attractive because it will have a modern district centre, has a big secondary school and two large primary schools being built already, so it would need less infrastructure than a totally new development.
The national housing policy is for significant new housing development in growth areas like Wokingham Borough, so the houses have to be built somewhere. If the council refuses all developments the Westminster Government will approve them anyway, but without consultation with residents or much council involvement at all. The Barkham campaign has already been labelled as NIMBYism by other parts of the borough, and to some extent the borough council trades off small campaigns from each particular area campaigning against each other, Grazeley residents are as passionate about their rural village as are Barkham, and Ruscombe residents are as passionate about preserving their village as are Barkham too. Really what we as a borough residents need to do is stop arguing against each other with leaflets like the Barkham one which says houses can be built in “other places”, and sit down and be realistic as a borough and answer the question – the government says we need to build these houses, where are we going to put them?
As we did at Arborfield Green, if the houses are going to come anyway, the questions we as a community need to be asking are not how do we stop all housing development here as that is unrealistic, but what do we as a community need in place to allow us to support the housing we are being asked to take. Do they need to provide a Medical Centre to support the extra houses? Do our schools have enough places? Do we need more road improvements? Is there enough green space?
Bohunt School and the Missing Sixth Form
There has been a lot of discussion, and a good deal of anger lately over the issue of sixth form provision at Bohunt School, so as we were one of the groups that were pushing for a new school prior to the building of what became Bohunt School, we thought we’d post a primer on how we have ended up at this point.
Firstly it is worth saying that those of us who were involved in the campaign to launch a free school, one of the things that resulted in Wokingham bringing forward their school plan earlier are livid that what we were pushing for is not being delivered. However whilst we’ve disagreed with and campaigned against Wokingham Borough Council over a lot of things, they had a sound plan for the school, that had it been followed, would have delivered a full 11-18 school for our children.
Firstly, it is important to understand how schools are funded following the 2011 Education Act. As part of the governments move from local authority controlled schools to independent free schools and academies the 2011 Education Act contains what is known as the Free School Presumption. In simple terms what that means is that local authorities can no longer provide and run new schools directly.
Instead there are two routes to a new school, firstly if local authorities identify a need for additional school places they can build a presumptive free school, for which the council funds the capital costs, and then a competition is run to select the academy sponsor that will run the school. The school site is then signed over to the academy. After that the academy is free to run the school as they wish, including, and this is critical here, deciding on the size and make up of their intake. This is the route Wokingham Borough Council went with Bohunt.
The other route is for academy trusts or other groups to propose a free school. The requirements are different for these, so they can be approved even if there is not a shortage of places locally, so for example after Wokingham Borough Council close Ryeish Green school, a local group of parents successfully had it reopened via the free school route, despite Wokingham deeming there wasn’t a need. Free schools in this situation are funded direct from central government. Another example of a local free school is the second Maiden Erlegh site that was proposed by the school.
So what happened in Arborfield?
The account of how we came to get Bohunt School in the first place is documented elsewhere, however Wokingham came up with a three phase plan for the building allowing it to be expanded later..
Whilst there is some increased demand for school places in Wokingham from the new house building, another significant driver has been the baby boom that the country experienced. Wokingham had been forecasting the need for a new school for the borough for a number of years, but also that demand would keep on rising, so the plan with the Arborfield school was to expand to track the bulge in numbers coming up through the school. Their plan can be found in the initial planning application for the school.
The image is a little small, but the critical part is the numbers and for the three phases:
Indicative dates in the introduction suggest that phase one was required by September 2016, phase two by September 2017, and potentially phase three to increase year 7 intake by September 2019.
With the councils predicted numbers the first two phases gave enough capacity for the current demand without leaving too many empty spaces in the system. This is important because schools are funded on a per student basis, so a school with empty spaces loses funding. With an increase in year seven numbers expected around 2019, phase three could be implemented to provide extra capacity.
That isn’t what happened. After taking 150 students in their first year of operation, Bohunt decided to increase this to 240 from the second year. As an independent free school they are entitled to decide on their own intake, whatever Wokingham initially specified. The maths for this is easy, 240 each year means that the phase two school for 1200 students is full with just 11-16, no space for a sixth form. Alongside that there isn’t the space for any additional year 7 students as planned, the space is for sixth form students. Whilst that did mean that the bulging year 7 were able to be accommodated, it only pushed the issue back a little, so the council still has an upcoming problem of accommodating year 7. They still need to provide school places for them, but what there isn’t is demand across the borough for is sixth form places, there are enough places across the borough, and we’re back to the same problem we had before Bohunt was built that the spaces are elsewhere in the borough, inconvenient for those in the south.
It is worth highlighting that the council has been well aware of the issue, indeed it is explicitly mentioned in their secondary school places strategy adopted in 2017. Bohunt is explicitly mentioned both in the Executive Summary, and also in this paragraph on page 22.
The details about funding later on are also important. The council is aware of the impending shortage of year 7 places in 2019, but also that council funding is under severe pressure, which has only got worse as time has gone on. The situation now is that they need to fund year 7 places, but their statutory requirement to provide sixth form places is being met across the borough – the sixth form capacity the phase 3 expansion at Bohunt would bring is not currently needed. They made a commitment to consider whether they could afford to fund the sixth form, not a promise to actually do it.
However there are other funding options available to academy trusts, but not available to the council. Maiden Erlegh got free school funding for their second site, why can’t Bohunt do the same for their sixth form? The answer is simple, in the current free school funding rounds the government is explicitly stating that new sixth form provision will not be funded if there is adequate sixth form places in the local area, unless the current provision is of a poor quality. Whilst parents may be concerned about their children having to travel further afield for sixth form, they all would agree that Wokingham is blessed with high quality sixth form provision across the borough.
So the question is, why did Bohunt take in more students than they were supposed to? If you look at the phasing they were intended to open with year 7, maybe year 8, and a sixth form, they opened only with year 7. They appear to have decided to use their sixth form numbers and take in the phase three intake, which because schools are funded on a per student basis would have brought them in more money annually benefiting the trust with a higher income. Maybe they assumed that they’d be able to get free school funding for the sixth form when the time came, or to find some rich benefactor? Maybe they naively thought that Wokingham Borough would be able to find the money in time – those of us who fought for a school for years could have told them that was unlikely, we got what we did in part from the developer contributions for Arborfield taking the largest housing development in the borough.
It is worth highlighting at this point that having these extra spaces in the system from Bohunt taking more students impacted other local schools with reduced funding, both Emmbrook and Forest schools have had a number of intakes of reduced size as families were attracted to the new facilities at Bohunt. You can get a hint of the feelings of those other schools by watching the episode of The Secret Teacher from Forest that Channel 4 aired recently. At one point the head teacher explicitly talks about the new school nearby, but for obvious reasons it isn’t named.
So what of the current situation. There is now a parent led petition calling on Wokingham Borough Council to fund the phase three expansion to provide a sixth form. However why should Wokingham, and the Wokingham tax payers across the borough fund a sixth form, where under the plans Wokingham submitted there should be one already? Why should we as tax payers bail out Bohunt Education Trust who took in more students than they were asked to, whilst promising parents a sixth form they didn’t have the capacity to accommodate? If Wokingham is going to fund a sixth form at Bohunt, what should they cut to pay for it?
Yes we’re livid that we’ve only got an 11-16 school when we thought we were getting a 11-18 school for our children in Arborfield, but Wokingham provided us with that, Bohunt caused the problem, Bohunt should sort it out.
Share this: