Question
There is a proposal to expand Aldryngton Primary School by increasing the intake by 15 as soon as this year. Your Committee approved the Primary School Planning Strategy 2016-2018 proposed by Children's Services on the 28th of January 2016. The Strategy included projections for the number of school places required in Earley for each year between 2015/2016 to 2021/2022 and it has been shown that the demand for both 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 intakes were overestimated in the Strategy report. The Strategy report also shows that there will be 0.8% surplus school places in Earley this year and 7 to 8% surplus school places in Earley for 2018/2019 to 2021/2022 without Aldryngton being expanded. Children's Services have said that the council will make the final decision on whether to expand Aldryngton in the light of actual information on the demand for school places in 2017. However, the decision for expansion should be based on the mid-term / long term projections. Shouldn't the Committee review the decision to expand Aldryngton Primary School, which your data and projections suggests is not actually needed, based on more up-to-date data and projections before allowing a £4.8 million expansion project to go ahead?
Minutes:
Question
There is a proposal to expand Aldryngton Primary School by increasing the intake by 15 as soon as this year. Your Committee approved the Primary School Planning Strategy 2016-2018 proposed by Children's Services on the 28th of January 2016. The Strategy included projections for the number of school places required in Earley for each year between 2015/2016 to 2021/2022 and it has been shown that the demand for both 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 intakes were overestimated in the Strategy report.
The Strategy report also shows that there will be 0.8% surplus school places in Earley this year and a 7 to 8% surplus school places in Earley for 2018/2019 to 2021/2022 without Aldryngton being expanded. Children's Services have said that the Council will make the final decision on whether to expand Aldryngton in the light of actual information on the demand for school places in 2017. However, the decision for expansion should be based on the mid-term to long term projections. Shouldn't the Committee review the decision to expand Aldryngton Primary School, which your data and projections suggests is not actually needed, based on more up-to-date data and projections before allowing a £4.8 million expansion project to go ahead?
Answer
While the information in the question concerning the roll projection data is correct, this can only form part of the picture when developing a strategy for ensuring sufficient school places. As an illustration of this, the roll projection for 15/16 appeared to demonstrate that adequate school places in Earley would be available. In reality, 30 Earley children, whose parents were hoping for a local school place, were diverted out of the area in order to obtain one.
Roll projections are very much led by numbers of live births in the area. This needs to be balanced against other less predictable factors such as housing churn where we have been seeing older families being replaced by families with younger children, the impact of which increases demand for local school places. Therefore, the Council needs to review actual demand for Earley school places in March in order to have as much contextual information as possible as the basis for the decision on whether or not to expand the school.
This decision will be taken by the end of March 2017. If the evidence does not support expansion, and subject to the granting of planning permission for the expansion, the Council will be able to implement the proposal in the next three years without incurring further design costs - if demand rises in that time, for example. Therefore there is no good case for pausing the process at this point as this could lead to hardship for Earley families if there are too few places available to meet need in September 2017 and, just an example of statistics which might be useful for you, in reception at the moment (just at Aldryngton) there are 59 students on the waiting list.
Supplementary Question
It is notable that Aldryngton Primary School has accommodated all foundation applicants from within catchment from at least 1988 with the exception of the last two years. You spoke about the housing churn; which in your report you stated was the key driver to demand. In the report a rather startling assumption is made on this point. The Council has data on the number of people aged 50-69 who moved out of Wokingham in the year prior to the report being published. 460 people left Wokingham in this age group. In your report you assumed that every single person in Wokingham in this age group that has moved lived in Earley. You further assumed that these 460 people were replaced with 230 couples each with 2 children aged 0-16, again, solely in Earley. Earley constitutes a tiny area of Wokingham and it seems plainly erroneous to assume that the area has a monopoly on this age group moving out of the Local Authority area. These inconsistencies, amongst others, raise concerns that the plans and underlying assumptions associated with the proposed expansion have not been subject to the correct degree of scrutiny. To this end residents and parents are keen to ensure that the final decision to expand the school is taken in a public forum. Please can you confirm that this will be the case?
Supplementary Answer
You may have been at the consultation event in Maiden Erlegh the other night, but as we said there and I will say it again, school place planning is not a fine art but we try and take in as much information as possible. But when you take live-birth data and project it forward, and including some of the other factors which you have mentioned (particularly in Earley), it is very difficult because as I have said a lot of older families have moved out with young families moving in; more so than in any other areas in the Borough. We have seen that we have needed many more school places there than in the other areas in a different type of context so I am saying it is not a perfect art which is why, in this particular context (which is Aldryngton), we have said that we will review this again in March when we have got the final figures that have come in and that is our promise to you.