| Holborn and St. Pancras Secondary School Campaign is now four years old!
Progress in 2009 has been frustratingly slow, and the growing election fever, both locally and nationally, means it is even more difficult to get a straight answer from anyone about how much longer we will have to wait for our local secondary school.
It is time for those parties currently running Camden council to stand up and honour their manifesto promises about a school at Wren St. because, right now, despite many encouraging words, they are further than ever from making ‘Wren St. Secondary School’ a reality. The whole initiative seems to be drowning in bureaucracy.
Our campaign has been reassured over the past two years that, the council was ‘working with us’ to meet the demand for a school south of Euston Rd outside of and in addition to ‘Building Schools For the Future’.
This action was pledged in acknowledgement of the coalition council’s embarrassing failure to find an appropriate site in our area to build a school within the Camden BSF timeframe, and our subsequent identification of a workable, Camden-owned site at Wren Street WC1. Indeed thanks to tenacious lobbying by local parents and Frank Dobson MP, central government has formally agreed the extra funding for such a school, and is just waiting for Camden officers provide data to demonstrate our need.
However, far from providing that data, Camden’s Children Schools and Families Directorate, has just admitted to us that Camden’s BSF plans completely betrays the council’s promise to work with us to provide our school ‘in addition to BSF’.
In fact, in spite of the Council Executive’s cross party support for our campaign’s aims, and the work they have long promised to undertake with adjoining central London boroughs about demand and pupil place data, it appears that Camden officers are still using only Camden data. They are now using that data to claim that ‘there does not appear to be a justification for a school south of Euston Rd until the mid 2020s’.
Suddenly it appears that Camden council is not ‘working with us’, but against us.
Cllr. Andrew Mennear’s latest proposal to give Holborn and Covent Garden children ‘priority’ at SCCS over children living nearer the school is more than a distraction:
It is a smokescreen for failure.
Not only does BSF do nothing to provide for our children's educational needs, it could prevent us getting a school south of Euston Rd within the next fifteen years unless the leadership takes positive action now.
Meanwhile Cllr, Mennear’s priority zone ‘experiment’ proposes to divide our community even more than before. Those living in Holborn and Covent Garden ward are to be offered priority access to places at SCCS but not their neighbours in King's Cross and Bloomsbury wards. And when SCCS is oversubscribed, particularly once all the new housing development has taken place, we could easily end up with the ridiculous situation of children living in Somers Town being
queue- jumped by those living a mile and a half away, creating yet more division and resentment between families.
Yet still we would have no local school for our children.
The painful irony here is that one of BSF’s stated aims is to tackle disadvantage and improve community cohesion. For us in the south of Camden it is simply entrenching divisive educational inequality. Camden council needs to stop shuffling figures around and start treating families and communities as real human beings. We all have an equal right to education. No more distractions or empty promises. What we need is a local secondary school, and we need it now.
|
