Issue - meetings

As detailed in the recommendations.   

Councillor Chris Bithell, Cabinet Member for Education, introduced the report to inform Cabinet of the responses from the statutory consultation period on the sustainability of John Summers High School and options for future educational provision in the area.  The report also informed Cabinet of the outcomes from the Education and Youth Overview and Scrutiny Committee and invited Cabinet to determine whether to proceed with a statutory proposal for school organisational change. 

                        In February 2015 Cabinet had agreed to open consultation on how best to secure resilient high quality education for the local area and its learners following consideration of the risk posed by low current and projected pupil numbers for the John Summers High School.  The consultation, which included a proposal to close the school, ran from 5 June 2015 to 17 July 2015 and involved statutory stakeholders and meetings were also held with school governors, parents, staff and pupils.  The main concern was the current low numbers of pupils at the school and the projected continuation of low numbers; the Council’s requirement for a secondary school to be sustainable was 600 pupils in total, or 120 per 11-16 year group.  Councillor Bithell explained that there were currently 2,113 surplus places in secondary schools across the County and that the Council had a duty to deal with the surplus places and therefore spending money on John Summers High School, which did not have enough pupils, was unsustainable.  The need to deal with the issue was now more urgent due to cuts to funding for local government and the substantial challenges that this brought. 

Discussions had taken place on the future projections of pupils from the Northern Gateway development and it had been suggested that this would make the school sustainable. This was not the case and therefore retention of the school could not be supported.  It had been hoped that John Summers High School would attract 85% of pupils from local primary schools but for the previous two years only 60% of children attended from local primary schools with 40% choosing to attend other schools.  The Northern Gateway development could take up to 13 years to complete and based on the current formula would only generate an estimated 200 secondary school pupils. Councillor Bithell said that it had been claimed that parents had chosen to send their children to other schools because of the uncertainty over the school but even when there was the possibility of the Council building a new campus on the site, the pupil numbers did not increase and the downward trend had continued. It was reported that pupil numbers had been falling each year since 2006 which was before any suggestion of the school closing and the consequences of retaining the school were included in the report that had been considered by the Education and Youth Overview & Scrutiny Committee at its meeting on 30 July 2015. 

School budgets were based on pupil numbers and to enable John Summers High School to meet its curriculum requirements, a  ...  view the full minutes text for item 58