The Campaign for a Secondary School in Holborn and St. Pancras

This campaign is organised by local parents who need a secondary school for their children living south of the Euston Road in the three Camden wards of Kings Cross, Bloomsbury and Holborn & Covent Garden.

Please register so we can keep you in touch with progress by clicking the 'REGISTER' button in the top menu bar. Registration will also allow you access to all the pages on this site including the downloads. If you have difficulty registering, send us an email via the CONTACT button above and we will do it for you. If you need to change your password or email address you can do this on the REGISTER page.

Take a look at OUR AIM. This describes our campaign and shows why there is a need for a secondary school in this area. OUR NEWS contains articles we have published and our newsletters.

FACTS & FIGURES gives the background in detail. For example: in the wards of Kings X, Bloomsbury, Holborn & Covent Garden total population 31,000 : Number of secondary schools 0. There are approximately 262 children of secondary school application age (Y6) living here, and this figure is set to rise in the coming years.

DOWNLOADS contains downloadable leaflets, flyers, the petition form and a great map showing all the secondary school catchment areas for Camden. We've also added Camden's Building Schools for the Future documents and Studio Weave's preliminary study into the Wren Street site.

LINKS is full of useful links to other websites including Camden, CNJ, DfES, Frank Dobson MP and Jamie Oliver. SUPPORT shows messages from Camden councillors and others.

Suggestions and offers of help are all gratefully recieved.

Register now and join our community in getting a Secondary School in Holborn and St. Pancras.

Camden Education Commission

The final report of Camden’s Education Commission has been published, and is available in the DOWNLOADS section of this website and also from Camden Council’s website here: www.camden.gov.uk/educationcommission There are a number of references to our campaign for The Holborn School.

In a supporting letter Camden says. "The final report sets out many challenges to all involved in the education system in Camden. The Council expects to look carefully at its own role and will be keen to work with others to meet the proposed ambitions set out in this report. The Council is working towards a published action plan by half-term in February".

If you have particular comments and observations on the report please to write to caroline.purcell@camden.gov.uk.

Here is an extract about place planning and admissions.

10. Place planning and admissions

. 10.1 In our interim report we observed that parents’ overwhelming concern was that they should have access to a good local school for their children, and this has been widely endorsed since publication. While many Camden parents do have such access, we remain concerned about the notable number who do not feel that they have.

. 10.2 In terms of place planning, the Commission believes that the Council’s approach has focused on balancing the numbers and has given insufficient attention to the location of provision and parental concerns. As a result, parents are pursuing a number of free school applications in areas with the greatest dissatisfaction, leaving the Council on the back foot with regard to the development of new schools in the borough.

. 10.3 At present South Camden Community School (SCCS) does not fill all its places. It currently has 850 students in a school with 1050 places and its capacity will increase to provide up to 1500 places by 2020 as a result of the Ł25m being invested to provide redeveloped buildings. Although there is some evidence that the opening of new school buildings can impact positively on recruitment, the Commission believes that for the school to fill these additional places poses a considerable challenge in the context of current parental choices, the impact across the borough as a whole of the opening of The UCL Academy and, potentially, the proposal to the Department for Education, now at business case stage, to establish a secondary free school south of the Euston Road.

. 10.4 Taking these factors together, it is our view that there is a case for considering carefully the opportunities to maximise the benefits to Camden of the new building with its cutting edge facilities and the additional capacity it will provide. For this reason we propose a serious study be undertaken of possible alternative configurations. Five opportunities are suggested:

a) the current plan which includes further continued improvement and a new building. Together this should attract more parents to choose the school for their children;
b) the creation of a 3-19 campus incorporating SCCS and one or more local primary schools in a federated structure;
c) the development of SCCS as a centre of excellence in vocational/technical education serving all Camden’s young people, ideally in partnership with the FE college, one or more local universities and a range of local employers. This would have the added benefit of meeting the gap identified by the Commission in terms of the vocational offer in Camden;
d) a partnership with a nearby prestigious HE or research institution such as the Francis Crick Institute or the University of the Arts;
e) a federation with the free school south of the Euston Road, if established.

10.5 If the building permits, a professional development centre might also be accommodated in collaboration with one or more local HE institutions and building on the existing, nationally acknowledged work of Camden City Learning Centre  on the SCCS site. An opportunity to develop SCCS itself into a professional development school might prove attractive if plans for a University Training School elsewhere in the borough do not come to fruition.

Wren Street. Architectural drawing. see DOWNLOADS for document

An Important Step Forwards

Dear campaigners

You will remember that, alongside the Institute of Education, local school campaigners have applied to set up a new sort of secondary school – a ‘University Training School’ – to serve the children living south of the Euston Road. We see our partnership with the Institute as invaluable in achieving our aim of very high standards of teaching and learning for every pupil.

In an important step, we have now received approval from the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, to move forward with our proposal and to develop the ‘business case’ for The Holborn School. This will provide more detail about the size, costs, curriculum, staffing and aims of the school. We are working on the business case now, and expect to submit it by October.

Since 2008 our preferred site for the school had been at Wren Street. Our architects carried out extensive work to show that a school on the site would be both practical and feasible as well as fitting the government’s space criteria. In 2009 the council approved two options for the Wren Street site: either for commercial redevelopment or as a school. Our preference is, of course, for our school. We are very conscious of the budget pressures on Camden but we understand that there will be no move to dispose of the site while plans for our much-needed secondary school are progressing.

Partnerships for Schools, the government agency responsible for the procurement of premises for new schools, has been searching for other options. They have identified some possible alternatives and are pursuing and investigating these now. However, Wren Street still remains very much the preferred choice, even though the current leases on the site do not expire before 2014.

For those of you whose children transferred this September from our local area to nearly forty secondary schools in a dozen boroughs, you need no other reminder of why The Holborn School is a necessity for our community. The Camden Education Commission’s interim report notes that only 51% of Camden resident secondary school pupils have places at a Camden secondary school.

We are very excited about moving from being a campaigning organisation to one planning an actual school. We are indebted to the Bloomsbury-based Institute of Education, the UK’s foremost providers of teacher education; their enthusiasm and determination to see our school come to fruition has been enormously encouraging and inspiring, providing much-needed energy and direction to those of us who have been campaigning now for six years!

Watch this space – we hope to have more news for you later this term.

Results of the Survey 2011

The Holborn School campaign would like to thank the 591 parents with a total of 971 children aged 9 or under who took the time to fill out our ‘Measuring Parental Demand’ survey in April, and all the community volunteers who made it possible. Whether you filled out a paper copy on the school gate, at a drop-in, at nursery, or completed it online, your efforts are very much appreciated.

We told you we would report back, and this is what you told us: A massive 80% of you said ‘Yes, we’re definitely interested in a new secondary school south of the Euston Road’, and a further 16% of you might be interested, but would like more information.

Three out of four families lived in the SER area and nearly all of the rest lived in adjacent neighbourhoods. (Only families with a child aged 9 or under were included because the school could not open before 2013). The vast majority of the children of primary school age attend one of the five primary schools in the SER area or Soho Parish school. The response represented the social and ethnic diversity of the area.

It was a real pleasure to meet so many fellow parents, and to learn that our campaign, now in its sixth year, has such strong support from so many families in our area. It was also a privilege to meet with the Headteachers of all five of our local primary schools and hear that they too fully recognise the need for a new secondary school to serve this vibrant, diverse area.

You can find the full report in the DOWNLOADS section of this website. The file is called: Survey 2011

Here Is Our School 2011

Last summer those of you who took part in our consultation at Coram’s Fields agreed that you wanted a secondary school:

· for all local children

· that genuinely represents our diverse population, as our primary schools do

· that has excellent teaching and high standards for all

· small enough to nurture and develop pupils as citizens within their community

· that works in partnership with local primary schools

· that makes creative and ambitious use of its central London location

· that shares facilities and works in partnership with the wider community.

We are delighted to announce that parents are now working with the Institute of Education, which is based locally in Bloomsbury, to make these aims a reality. We have just submitted a bid to the Department for Education to build “The Holborn School”.

We have campaigned for the past five years – through the coming and going of Building Schools for the Future, through policies like ‘parent promoted trusts’, ‘academies’ and so on. Now we are using ‘free school’ legislation to try to provide what’s always been needed: a good local secondary school.

The current primary school ‘bulge’ in Camden makes our case for a secondary school even stronger. Local children of secondary age currently attend 45 different secondary schools, excluding Camden schools, and are effectively a ‘reservoir’ for left over places. The catchment areas of secondary schools in Camden and our surrounding boroughs may fluctuate over the years, but our need for a local school can only be met by building one.

Things are at a very early stage, and we will face many more challenges in the months and years to come, but we parents have made a long-term commitment to this campaign, and this is a chance of a long-term solution for our community.

In the DOWNLOADS section of our website is a file called Proposal Update FAQ. It gives our answers to questions about our proposal. Please click on the link and download it.

Free school legislation is new and untested, and to ‘do it ourselves’ we will need expert advice and support. Our commitment to working with Camden Council and with the Camden family of schools remains unchanged, and the involvement of the IOE is a very exciting development, but now, more than ever: YOUR CAMPAIGN NEEDS YOU!

Our next step will be to form a charitable trust made up of parents, teachers, community representatives and IOE staff

If you have skills, experience or time to offer, as a Campaign volunteer, a trustee or both, then don’t hold back - this is a great opportunity make a difference to your community.

Please contact us via the website. Click the CONTACT button in the top menu bar.

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Wren Street Site