school closures

Dec 6 2011

Wakeman School to Close – Schools Adjudicator Lessons

I’ve received the sad news in recent days that the fight to save the Wakeman School in Shrewsbury from closure has been unsuccessful. Despite putting up a fantastic fight and with the support of most of the local community and the local Diocese, The Schools Adjudicator has approved the Shropshire County Council plan to close the school.

Having read the Adjudicator’s report in detail, I must say that I am disappointed with his report which does not, in my opinion, provide the level playing field that I have previously supported and championed. He glosses over some of the clear inadequacies of the council’s process and consultation and does not delve sufficiently deeply into the statistics which were contentious and challenged strongly by the Wakeman Parents group. There were no reprimands, slight or otherwise, for a council that did not plan to consult formally with the school’s pupils or the feeder primary schools. He stated that these things had happened but chose to allow the council off scot free with the argument that eventually these groups were aware of the consultation (mainly because of the school and parents’ actions) so they got their opportunity to make their representations anyway! He seems not to have seen this as a failing of the council which seems inexcusable. In similar situations, I have seen Schools Adjudicators criticise councils in their reports for identical failures.

Up to this point I have felt that access to The Schools Adjudicator is a positive thing to ensure an unbiased and objective assessment of the situation. This report shows that the Schools Adjudicators are individuals and have their own predispositions. In other words, your chances of getting a fair hearing might depend on which Schools Adjudicator you get for your appeal.

In many ways this is still preferable to a more cynical interpretation of this report which might suggest that, generally speaking, councils’ arguments are now being given more priority because of the dire financial circumstances they find themselves in. But where does this leave good schools and parents and pupils? Is the Statutory Code of Guidance being interpreted in favour of councils to help save them money? Let’s hope this is not the case or else the code’s phrase “an education system shaped by parents” sounds very hollow and deliberately misleading.

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Nov 5 2010

Closure Proposals – The Schools Adjudicator

I’ve talked a little before about the Schools Adjudicator and their role in hearing appeals against a council’s school closure proposal. I feel that they provide an objective assessment of your case as opposed to the heavily biased case for closure that your council puts forward. (Many councils do not even tell parents there is a possibility of an appeal to the Schools Adjudicator!)

However, you can learn a lot from reading some of the previous decisions made by the Schools Adjudicator. If you go to the Schools Adjudicator web site and look down the menu you will be able to find all the published decisions made by the Schools Adjudicator for several years back. The decision reports are short (10-20 pages long generally) but packed with information. They are in date order generally but with a bit of effort on your part you can find decisions made about schools that are a close fit to your situation. You just need to read the beginnings of the reports.

When you have identified the decision reports that closely match your own situation print them off and read them carefully and make notes. They may not all be favourable results but you can learn so much about what the Schools Adjudicators are looking for, what are important factors in their assessments, what factors are less important and how they come to their decisions. This is invaluable information when you are planning a campaign or drawing up your response to consultation or, if you are very lucky, writing a report for the Schools Adjudicator at an appeal.

The key thing is that the Schools Adjudicator will make an assessment based around the Statutory Code of Guidance for school closure but inevitably there will  be different emphases on different factors. Reading the reports will give you an insight into what the Schools Adjudicator generally deems as important. You can also see how each individual inspector interprets the statutory guidance from the way they write the report and summarise their findings.

My advice would be to spend some time researching these reports as they are a very useful resource in planning terms.

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Oct 22 2010

Government Spending Review

We have seen the coalition government unveil how it is going to claw back the enormous borrowing deficit on Wednesday this week.  It is comforting to see that Education generally is being shielded from the swingeing cuts proposed for other public sector services. There were a number of interesting announcements which may give cause for concern in schools.

The government has  said that there will be a capital programme for new schools and refurbishment of schools but significantly curtailed from the previous government’s building schools for the future programme. A figure of £600 million in total was mentioned but with no indication of how this will be spent and what criteria will guide the allocation of money. Perhaps this will become clearer in November to councils. It may persuade some councils to re-evaluate their current strategies with regard to school closure.

There is also the proposed pupil premium where it is proposed that more money will be attached to children in disadvantaged areas. This is to commended but the impact of such a radical redistribution of educational budgets will help some schools but create major challenges for others. The size of the cake will still be getting smaller despite the acceptance that more children will be funnelling into the educational system over the next decade.

And there is still no indication of how the new idea of free schools is going to be paid for. Will it be taken form the existing education budget or will there be some additional,  separate and distinct funding available? Again we will only find this out through time.

In my opinion, there are still some choppy waters ahead for schools and parents need to be aware that councils will still be looking to save money and closing schools is still the way to achieve significant savings.

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Sep 25 2010

Presentation on Gillas Lane Primary School Campaign to NASS Northern Regional Conference 24.09.2010

Saving a (Relatively) Small School

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Sep 21 2010

NASS Northern Regional Small Schools Conference – 24 September 2010

I have been invited to give a presentation at the NASS Northern Regional Small Schools Conference at the Rheged Discovery Centre in Cumbria near Penrith this Friday, 24 September 2010. I will be talking about how GLASS (Gillas Lane Action to Support School) helped to save a small primary school in detail and what more general lessons we can learn from that.

I must thank Barbara Taylor and Mervyn Benford for giving me the opportunity to broadcast to a wider audience the experiences of GLASS and touch upon some of the strong arguments for keeping small schools open as part of a diverse collection of schools that gives parents a real choice when deciding the school for their child.

I do understand that local education authorities do have a job to do in managing school places and budgets but in my experience so far certain authorities (in North East England) efforts at consultation, option appraisal and decision making have been poor, self serving and not in line with statutory guidance. In one authority, a policy decision has been taken to get rid of small schools altogether, regardless of the standard of education they produce and the parents and community support, and this is being actively worked upon at the moment. It seems to be a purely economic argument which is destined to fall foul of statutory guidance and prevailing pupil forecasts.

To avoid the worst excesses of school place planning exercises then parents need to be vigilant and band together to fight any proposal to close their school where it clearly is not of benefit to their children. The fight may or may not be successful but it may be the only thing you can do

What I have seen, in several cases, is local authorities riding roughshod over parents wishes and arguments, basing whole school planning strategies on outdated information, arguing against solid and verifiable information, not willing to enter into proper debate with parents and action groups, making politically motivated decisions at the expense of rational ones and generally acting in an arrogant and uncaring way towards parents. I hope this is not typical of all local authorities in the UK but I suspect it is more prevalent than we would hope.

Parents are put into an impossible position when faced with a school closure proposal. This may be the first time they have ever dealt with a local authority. They have no training for this and little knowledge about the process and what to do. They are faced with a big organisation with tremendous resources at its disposal who probably has already made its mind up about its preferred option. Parents are at a massive disadvantage but they can win, as we proved at Gillas Lane. It requires commitment, hard work, patience, endurance and a willingness to learn new things and probably do things you’ve never done before. All very daunting. However, if you value your child’s educational future then to fight is a natural reaction. You’ve just got to know what is the best way to get a favourable result. If you read all of the posts on this site you will get a lot of useful information about what works and what doesn’t.

I’ll post again after the conference and tell you of my experiences.

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Jul 11 2010

School Closures – Political Yoyos

Have you seen the debate going on about the cancelling of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme? To my mind it typifies the ineptitude of both the outgoing and incoming governments.

I understand the coalition government has a big task on its hands in finding cuts in public sector spending and the big juicy BSF programme was ripe for cancellation. However, they have raced into a hurricane of criticism because of the mistakes and errors that have been made by in compiling their list of schools affected. Now Michael Gove is having to backtrack a little (and so he should in certain cases) but he is now being hounded by Ed Balls, the previous Education Minister.

The other big idea from the coalition government is to axe the Census with no clear idea of what will replace it. All public services need base data on population trends from a national to a local level so that they can plan public services. The danger here is that a decision will be taken before the options are assessed and a viable alternative is agreed to satisfy a short term financial pressure.

Ed Balls on the other hand is ramping up the pressure on the government with much public support for this popular programme which the country cannot afford in its present state. However, he is also the Minister who presided over the closure of many perfectly good primary schools by local authorities that are now having to having to replace them because of the pressure now being put on the areas by rising pupil populations! They encouraged local authorities to close primary schools because of falling rolls yet failed to see the big wave of school pupils coming over the hill! What brilliant forward planning!

I suppose my point is that, whatever government is in power, parents should not expect any help in their fights to save their primary schools. Both government and opposition have different agendas to each other and parents and parents must fight their own corner with the help of the law and its guidance and seek to get an objective view on their case. What seems blindingly obvious to parents isn’t even given a backward glance by the political parties.

Education policy is now in a big mess. Parents need to be vigilant because anything can happen in these dangerous and volatile times for education. Parents have few rights and governments pay lip service to parent participation in education so parents really need to form a national body so that their views on education policy have to be heard. We can fight the good fight when our backs are against the wall ie when our school is threatened with closure but we need to strike earlier and more strategically. Insert some common sense into governmental thinking.

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Jul 7 2010

Primary School Populations Projected to Rise!

The last couple of weeks have been very interesting with information coming out of the ONS and the Department of Education indicating that, far from primary school numbers forecast to fall, these numbers are set to rise to record levels by 2018! This, coupled with the effective moratorium on the schools building programme, may cause some headaches for school planners. Indeed, it must cause some consternation in many local education authorities that have based their strategies on falling rolls rather than increasing rolls.

In June 2010, the BBC reported on this issue. The full news item can be seen by clicking the link below:

BBC news item – Primary Pupil Numbers “Growing”

A recent newspaper article in the Daily Mail in July 2010 reported the following:

“Children face an unprecedented scramble for primary school places following forecasts that pupil numbers will rise by more than 500,000 in only eight years.

Schools will come under intense pressure as the number of four to eleven year olds increases to its highest levels since the 1970s.

They will be forced to accommodate 540,000 extra youngsters at a time of severe public spending cuts prompting fears that pupils will be taught in classes of more than 40 or in temporary buildings. According to projections by the Department of Education the numbers at nursery and primary schools is predicted to soar to 4,526,000 by 2018 – the biggest total for four decades. This is a 13.5 per cent increase on the current number 3,986,000.

The equivalent of more than 2000 extra primary schools will be needed to accommodate the extra pupils.

London will be particularly hard-hit. The primary population in the capital is expected to grow by 16% to 748,000 by 2014.”

This just acknowledges what many parents groups have felt for some time that primary school populations are on the verge of explosion after evidence of high birth rates over the last few years.

It does seem a pity that many education authorities have been blind to these trends even when they have had them pointed out by parents groups.

On the evidence now provided by ONS (Office of National Statistics) many local authorities should now have the good grace to at least review their school place planning strategies and the assumptions they are built on. The current emphasis on school closures should now be challenged strongly as the primary school stocks must be seen as assets rather than liabilities in the current economic climate.

The new coalition government has promised to review capital spending in the autumn spending review with priority going to primary school building.

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Jun 30 2010

School Closures and the Economy

Everyone knows that we are in the most difficult economic circumstances for generations. The new coalition government has just announced drastic measures to cut public expenditure. Figures of 25% over the next five years have been mentioned. This may be an underestimate as some public services will be protected ie NHS. Where does this leave education?

There is no doubt in my mind that education will face some severe cuts particularly in the new schools capital programmes. This will have a significant impact on education. Yet local government will also be faced with jaw dropping reductions in their day to day (revenue) spending as well. The only way that local authorities will be able to balance the books in education will be to close or amalgamate schools and make teachers redundant. So there will be even more pressure on local authorities to find schools to close or amalgamate from now on. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this approach, it will happen.

Small schools are easy targets. Economically they represent a less efficient use of scarce education financial resources regardless of the educational benefits that a small school can bring to its pupils. Even if the small schools survive they will have to operate on a much smaller budget. Class sizes will rise. In some cases the operational viability of small schools will come into question. It is a gloomy picture but one which I fear is realistic for the next few years as the country tries to get back into a more positive economic footing.

I do have some sympathy for what local government will have to go through and education in particular. But parents still have the right to fight for their child’s education and they will have their say in the matter of proposed closures. The rule of law becomes ever more important in the closure process and the statutory guidance is key to any successful challenge. If local authorities do not carry out review processes comprehensively, fairly and consistently, if they ignore statutory guidance, if their consultation methods are poor, then parents have a right and a duty to complain and challenge the proposals.

The nagging fear is that the government will change the rules on school closures to make it easier for local authorities to make closures happen in order to meet the financial targets being set. This could erode parents’ ability to challenge and object to proposals they feel are unfair. Unscrupulous local authorities could use any changes to ride roughshod over parents’ wishes and preferences.

The situation is serious and needs to be monitored constantly. We need to be vigilant and watch the press and the media for any proposed changes by the incumbent government affecting education. I will try and assess the impact of any possible changes on the guidance given on this site.

In the meantime, fight the good fight using all the means at your disposal.

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Jun 29 2010

School Closures in Wales

Closing a school in Wales is governed by the Welsh National Assembly. You can access the details below:-

School Organisation Proposals: Welsh Assembly Government Circular No: 021/2009

However, the situation appears to be changing as the Minister wants to reduce the time taken to make a decision and reduce the involvement of the Minister in appeals cases where there are objections. The text of his latest letter is shown below (dated June 2010):-

Minister’s Oral Statement – School Organisation – June 2010

It seems to me that the National Assembly is trying to get out of the difficult process of making the final decision in most cases. However, it is not clear if there will be a replacement for their appeals process at local level that is fair and objective. May be now is the time to lobby the National Assembly to keep a workable appeals process in the new proposals.

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Jun 4 2010

School Closure Process – Video

School Closure Process (England)

Click the above link and the video will load up and play with Windows Media Player. There is an audio commentary with the presentation.

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