school rebuild funding removed

[zoej]

I could do with some advice and help with an issue that has become rather acute.

my sons primary school is one of the top in West Sussex and last June/July finally got priority 1/top of the list for a very long awaited school rebuild. They were allocated 3 million and plans have been progressing at a good speed towards demolition this July. In the last week it all went quiet and the school was tipped off. The county council have removed the funding. They were not even go to tell the school until it was finalised. they have not answered the goveners questions fully and come up with excused like the goal posts have changed after we had been awareded the money????

I have written to loads of local councillors and MP's and evn to Mr Blair etc. My 6 year old even wrote to the local papers and has had his photo taken to apear in the paper tomorrow.

Has anyone else ever experienced anything similar and how do we fight it?

The final decision is due to happen this friday and we are running out of ideas.

Find out how the council has made the decision to withdraw the funding: it is likely that it is some kind of committee. Corner your local councillor, and any other councillors you can get hold, and get your local councillor to use the council processes to object formally to the decision - I think it is called a late motion or something like that. In the meantime find out your council's complaints procedure and use it, both as individual parents and the governors as a body, complying with each step to the letter with a view to taking the complaint to the councils ombudsman (you have to exhaust council complaints procedures to do this). The aim of both getting your council to object and for everyone to complain formally is to show that the decision was taken incorrectly, that there was no consultation, or even that the council did not have power to revoke the decision (I'm clutching at straws on that one, you need to research whether that is the case) etc.

Councils have to keep minutes of all decision making, and the minutes are available for inspection by the public: it means that someone has to go to the council offices and trawl through everything to find and read them. The minutes should give the reasoning behind the decision and the process that was followed to reach it. If either of these are defective, eg proper procedure was not followed or irrelevant considerations were taken into account, or no clear grounds are stated for the decision, then you have grounds to challenge the council.

If the governors can afford to, it would probably be a good idea to take legal advice as so much is at stake.

With a group of neighbours I have been fighting my local council over a residents parking issue. It is like swimming through treacle, and we've discovered that unfortunately it is not uncommon for elected councillors not to understand their own council procedures, and they tend to get pushed around by employed council executives. There are very rigid deadlines for councillors to object, and if these have been missed, then that can be a big problem. A lot of decisions get made in committee, and are put to the elected representative in summarized for rubber stamping and councillors don't actually find about them until it is too late, because they don't fully understand what they are approving.

Hth and good luck.