New Secondary Schools for Richmond 3

[BayJay]

Hello and welcome to the Mumsnet thread about Richmond Borough Secondary Schools. The discussion started in February 2011 in two parallel locations here and here.

In November 2011 the most active of those two threads, in Mumsnet Local, reached 1000 messages (the maximum allowed) so we continued the conversation here.

Now its May 2012 and that thread has also filled up, so the conversation will continue here ......

Magic Faraway - talking about you situation in 2005 you said: "Interesting to see the Cllr Eady's response...
Lib Dem spokesperson for education, Cllr Malcolm Eady, said: "It will be very hard for the Catholic church to get planning permission for the site, and it is a great pity, that instead of embarking on a controversial proposal, they do not put their energy, time and money into finding a site closer to the centre of the borough, preferably on a brown field site.
"If this search were successful, then the bid would have my full support."

Well, now we have the central site. Maybe he is happy after all. "

I am not an apologist for the Lib Dems who have been pretty feeble. But the point is that he said he thought the church should put its "time energy and money" into finding a site - but what it is now doing is taking a large percentage of the money available for education to the local council leaving it very short of money for everyone else.

Tedd 75 - Sacred Heart is well known for losing children at an early stage. Sacred Heart parents complain about the % of parents who choose the school because of the ties seeing it as some sort of free pre-prep school and then remove their offspring at the end of year 2. Also, as Sacred Heart is full of children who aren't from Teddington, they are less likely to stick around because they discover that commuting anywhere by car in this area at school time is a considerable burden so they are more likely to move their children to a school closer to home when space becomes available. Another factor is that Catholic schools are often chosen by families where one or both parents come from a Catholic country so they are more likely to relocate after a few years. I think this cultural choice by parents is underplayed as a reason for Catholic schools' popularity locally - statistics show we have a higher percentage of European families from Catholic countries than many parts of London and nearly every family I know who has chosen a Catholic school has one or two parents from Ireland, Spain, Italy, France, Poland etc. I can understand why they want a school that has a link to their own upbringing.

Hi Lottie, I agree that there are a large number of Continental European born families in Richmond inflating the numbers for Catholic school attendance, however I would say that most also choose based on school quality as we have no state faith schools in Italy and very few private ones, and this is the case in most of Europe. Most of my fellow nationals find the system here baffling but soon realise that being a Catholic can mean access to a good school and adapt accordingly!

The reference to Christ's is paragraph 4.8

'If the school expanded to accommodate 150 children per Year 7 intake, the likely intention would be that the places would be split 75:75 between Foundation and Open, but the possibility of a Catholic secondary school being established in the borough could have the effect of the real split becoming 50:100.'

If Waldegrave and the Catholic school are 'borough-wide resources' then Christ's may be regarded in the same way by the council. If the need for places is mainly in Twickenham, in terms of primary expansions so far, Christ's would only relieve a little of that pressure if the foundation places are filled from the CofE schools in Twickenham, otherwise it would have the same effect on neighbouring academies that the council argued against when considering a community (or inclusive Catholic school) at Clifden.

Changing the subject slightly, just passing on the following text of an email from the New Schools Network sent out today, giving a good summary of Ofsted's new inspection framework ....

"As you may be aware, Ofsted have been reviewing the process for school and teacher inspections. Ofsted have today announced the results of the consultation process and outlined the changes that will come into effect from the 1st of September 2012. As these changes will impact on how ... schools will be inspected, New Schools Network has prepared a brief outline of the changes below. If you would like to review the framework consultation documents and the FAQ in more detail you can access them both here.

Changes to the Inspection Framework:

- Schools must have ?Outstanding? teaching practice to be judged ?Outstanding? overall

- ?Good? is now the acceptable standard of education

- ?Requires Improvement? category will replace ?Satisfactory?

- Earlier re-inspections for schools judged ?Requires Improvement?

- ?Serious Weakness? will replace ?Notice to Improve? category

- Usual limits will be set for the number of times a school ?Requires Improvement? before being placed in ?Serious Weakness? category

- Schools will have less notice before an inspection

- Schools will supply anonymised information regarding teachers? performance"

That will certainly shake things up a bit!

Lottie - I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that Sacred Heart is viewed as some sort of pre-prep with no fees. Indeed, I'm not sure why or how that would be the case, it is after all still offering class sizes of 30 and the national curriculum - much like all the community schools.

I suspect the reason is much more mundane. Turnover is pretty high at ALL Richmond schools. However, people moving to Teddington for the schools (and filling those empty in-year places when they come up) are likely to be aiming for Teddington School for secondary. Therefore they are less likely to be Catholic. Indeed, why would anyone wanting a Catholic secondary education move to Teddington?

This will presumably change with the new school, although whether a Catholic would want to pay Teddington house prices (inflated due to Teddington School) for it remains to be seen!

Little Miss Muppet - only repeating what I've been told by Sacred Heart parents - that it attracts some parents who like the traditional ethos, feel and look of the place. The children certainly look a lot smarter than average state school in their maroon jumpers and ties as do St. James children. Sacred Heart is often offered to non-Catholics as the only place in Teddington with free space. When my friends returned from Dubai after 3 years they were told that their daughter would have to go to Sacred Heart for the last 2 months of Year 6 if they wanted her to get into Teddington school as all the other linked schools were full despite the fact that they are atheists who live very near Teddington School. Agree it would be totally pointless to move to Teddington unless you wanted to take advantage of our fabulous open-to-all who-live-near-enough inclusive secondary school where Catholics are always very welcome.

Do we think the impact of this would be that more Catholic families will move near Clifden Road and Non Catholics moving out from there ?

Jeev, can't help wondering if we sell up, whether the family moving in (all the houses sold in our roads in my time living here have gone to young families) would be non Catholic risking the black hole, non Catholic already decided on a private education, putting up with living near a 1200 pupil school with a very wide catchment and accompanying parents in cars, or Catholic...............

Actually Jeev that is a serious point I made to the Scrutiny Committee. The side effect of the Council's reactive schools strategy ( focused on minimising the risk of spare capacity by scrabbling around when applications exceed places to create capacity by finding room for a portacabin, or a distant school with space, and deterring parents into moving or going private) is that the communities that have formed in our streets, neighbourhoods, childbirth classes, toddler groups and schools get broken up. I had a wonderful group of friends that I met at the childbirth classes at our local doctor's surgery in Sheen, a social mix too (Yes there is a social mix in Sheen, deprivation even, though on the other side of the Upper Richmond Road to Lord True, he probably hasn't noticed). Few of our children went to the same schools and now we are spread across the borough and quite a few are out in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire, wherever there was provision of good schools. The break up of our community was directly the result of the lack of spaces in good local schools.

That is why I am so angry that, when exactly the same thing is about to happen in Central Twickenham, the perfect site for a school to serve our community is given to a group who have always had other choices, who were cushioned against the impact of the Council's Schools strategy. As far as the Council are concerned their wants are more important than my community ( and actually what with high rise developments, multi storey car parks and who knows what else they plan they seem to be putting just about everyone's wants ahead of our community!!)

It's future now rests on the Free School for Twickenham, and if it happens, as we are all sure, if committment and passion have anything to do with it, it will, it certainly not be the Council we have to thank.

Jeev - in the short term I would very much doubt it. It will take a number of years to build up the sort of reputation that will draw people in. Also, living on the school doorstep won't offer any advantage in admissions, in contrast to admissions to community schools. There would presumably be some borough-wide increase in time. It's hard to gauge how big it will be as we don't know how strong the pull of an untested school will be.

It will be interesting to see how many in-borough Catholic children actually end up there in the first few years. Parents that have been busy doing the church flowers and cleaning benches aren't going to suddenly lose interest in the Oratory, after all. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is a small but not insignificant number of community places available initially. Unless of course it just takes all the out-of-borough Catholics that would have gone to St Paul's, Sunbury.

It's all guesses, of course. No one really knows what the outcome will be, and no attempt to model the numbers has been done. All we know is that there were several thousand people that signed a petition, and that there are a number of very vocal and influential cheerleaders.

Interesting points. Segregation in schools has broken even our local community. Ultimately people get drawn to nearby schools. Even if the proposed Catholic schools will have random allocation, it is possible that parents whose kids get in will move near Clifden. Everyone prefers a walk to the school rather than waste time commuting

The minutes of the May 15 meeting of the Scrutiny Ctee have been published:

. . The Cabinet Member for Schools, the Director Education, Children's Services and Culture and the Head of School Commissioning made the following points in response to questions from the Committee:

• It was not likely that the borough?s secondary school capacity would be exceeded before 2016 / 2017.
• The proposed voluntary-aided secondary and primary schools were being proposed by the Diocese of Westminster and not the Council. The Council would decide at Cabinet weather [sic] to approve the proposal.
• It was the Council?s plan to increase choice and diversity of schools, and the Clifden Road site should be viewed as part of the overall programme and not in isolation.
• The Council had received legal advice that supported their course of action regarding for the Clifden Road site.
• The Clifden Road Site had not been purchased at that time and the contracts had not been finalised.
• The Council had to provide and plan for increasing school capacity which will be needed by 2016/17. A Catholic school would not have a negative impact (financially or otherwise) on these plans.
• Residents? views, on either side, had been carefully considered and the results of the Council?s consultation been given due consideration.
• The Council deemed the admissions policies, proposed by the Diocese for Westminster for the schools, to be lawful and that they would meet the demand from local residents.
• The Council?s forecasts had been accurate, so far, and they were confident that they could meet demand for school places in the future, through ongoing evaluation of demand.

It was RESOLVED that it should be recommended to Cabinet to approve:

4a. the lease of Clifden Road site to the Diocese of Westminster for the establishment of voluntary-aided secondary and primary schools and;

4b. the Diocese?s proposals to establish voluntary aided primary and secondary schools . .

I did find it a bit mindbending, having a background in business planning in the public sector that they could sit there and say all this and then back it up basically by saying "Trust me I'm a Professional with years of experience" and "forecasting is an art not a science". Well I'm a professional (qualifications filling up a business card) and I had 25 years experience, which did help me to forecast accurately because I knew the markets so well, but that didn't mean that I didn't have to back up every figure with evidence and go to Board Meetings, Government Officials and Select Committees with reams of modelling data and a full risk assessment with weighting according to impact and probability, and upside and downside forecasts with plans on what action would be taken if those risks were realised. And what a dream it would have been to be able to have a supply led plan, that always aimed to have fully used capacity, regardless of the degree to which, indeed whether, it risked unfulfilled demand.

I did some asking about and there are Councils who do plan to demand, that have sophisticated modelling based not just on experience but all sorts of demographic and economic data and qualitative research (asking parents!!!), processes for refining their models iteratively and the weighting they should give to risks, and it is done at individual community level, bottom up as well as top down. It's not rocket science but it does work better than always playing catch up when risks do materialise...

They are now complaining one of the reasons they fail to forecast primary demand is that fewer parents are going private, but Surrey are already planning for the trend that they forecast in primary schools post 2008 crash coming through to secondary levels on the basis that parents will initially make the sacrifice at primary level but sustained recession will see it happening in secondary schools too.

They complain about parents moving to the borough for schools but do they have any understanding of what is going on? Have they asked Estate agents who is moving in and why and where? Seems to me from other pages on here that Nappy Valley is coming west, and they like places that feel like Nappy Valley. So there are going to be huge problems between the catchments of schools there.

And do they understand teh relationship between quality and demand, seems like when standards improve they are calways wrong footed by the speed at which catchments shrink.

These forecasts are high risk because they are making a lot of assumptions just on, being nice about it and not implying an agenda, gut feel. Their forecasts are based on the assumption removal of links will mean, based on 2011 admissions, that only 1 Hounslow child will get into Orleans on distance and the other 29 who would have got in will disappear off Richmond's radar? really? Has anyone asked them if they feel they belong to Hounslow and not Twickenham? and so won't want their children at a Twickenham School?

And they don't even get my name right!!

Copthallresident: very interested in what you write about good practice elsewhere: can you provide some specific examples, please?

One nugget which I omitted to post when I found it: Tables from the GLA Intelligence Unit show that the no. of births went up between 2001 and 2010 by 25 % here in Richmond, 29 % in Kingston (the median for London) and 41 % in Hounslow (the fourth highest increase, after Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich and Redbridge). Where are all these extra kids going to go to school?

What a biased and shambolic Scrutiny committee meeting report. Where is the mention of the fact that Andy Cole refused to acknowledge his prejeducial interest and made a statement. Are they now too ashamed to acknowledge that they made a mistake in letting Andy Cole stay?

ChrisSquire Will ask, I wasn't after specifics and my source is an ex colleague, now local government, so wants to stay undercover! Apparently the Dof E did have an initiative to share best practise on school place forecasting because some Councils were doing good things along the lines I posted. Resistance to scientific forecasting methods stems from the argument that there is a strong local element but the D of E considered there were useful developments that could be pick and mixed. I don't know if anything ever got into the public domain? Now there are private sector providers seeking to do what the D of E were going to do, and selling it to Councils. They are headhunting those with useful experience.... There is already software out there but not particularly good. It is also something that often gets written up as part of academic projects so that may be a source too.

A quick google brought up an example of school place planning in Swindon. I haven't read it all the way through, but I can see from the appendix that at least three panning scenarios were modelled for comparison against each other.

As I've mentioned before, some members of the scrutiny committee did try to point out that there were risks in the council's forecasting methodology at their Nov meeting but were outvoted.

And I think this is the gateway to the best practice initiative that CopthallResident was referring to.

Are not Councils expected to follow best practices and learn from each other. If the benchmark is scientific modelling of future outcomes, then why is Richmond Council lagging behind ?
Nick Whitfield would have sounded more credible had his department followed a robust forecasting process . BaYJay I am surprised that this was highlighted in a previous SC meeting and no action was taken. Why was this not escalated then?

Chris is there a standards committee in the Council that looks into this and can encourage the Education deparment to get more scientific and dare I use the word " professional " in their approach

I am surprised reading the SC meeting minutes. It does not capture adequately the key points made by those who spoke against the proposals, the views and concerns expressed by Committee members, including the leader of the opposition.

Finally It does not record the vote taken (7 for 6 against, 1 abstention), despite the fact that this was reported by the chairman to the Cabinet the following week). Arguably it should also record who voted for what.

It was a public meeting and the public deserves to see the commensurate level of transperancy and granularity in the published minutes.

Why was this not escalated then?
Because its a committee, and it voted not to.

p.s. A personal account of what happened at the Nov meeting can be found at post [Thu 15-Dec-11 14:54:37] in the previous thread.

(And if anyone knows how to link directly to a specific post in another thread, please let me know!)

Can you really trust someone who doesn't know the difference between "weather" and "whether" (or that their spelling is so bad that they should use spellcheck) to produce a comprehensive and accurate set of minutes!? Doesn't inspire confidence! Letter to Gillian Norton!