Spending £30m on a new school was ‘crazy’ and a waste of money, according to a local MP.
GENE BRODIE, our education correspondent, reports
Croydon’s newest part-selective secondary school is being forced to move all its staff, equipment and more than 500 pupils more than a mile across the borough because its £30million building won’t be ready by September.
Wates have finally admitted that they can’t deliver on the school build by September
Coombe Wood School was granted planning permission in 2018 to be built on what had previously been playing fields, after Croydon’s Labour-run council removed Green Belt protection from the site, just across from Lloyd Park.
When planning permission was granted for the 1,200-pupil free school, Croydon already had 5,000 surplus secondary school places in the borough.
In many respects, it is that very surfeit of school places which is allowing Coombe Wood to move into a purpose-built and empty secondary school – St Andrew’s – which has been forced to close because of falling school rolls.
The move again raises serious questions over why tens of millions of public money is being spent on school buildings and why the destruction of Green Belt land has been permitted to facilitate a new free school when other schools are operating well under-capacity.
The MP for the area has described the whole exercise as “crazy” and “a massive waste of public money”.
Coombe Wood School’s pupils in Years 7, 8 and 9 will start the 2020-2021 academic year using the St Andrew’s High buildings on Warrington Road in Old Town, close to the Flyover. They are expected to be based there at least until January 2021, though sources close to the school suggest that the buildings may not be ready until September 2021, just in time for Coombe Wood to open its school gates to sixth formers for the first time.
Home from home: the St Andrew’s site will provide a temporary base for Coombe Wood
The school is run by the Folio Trust which has been established by Jonathan Wilden, formerly the head at Wallington County Grammar School for Boys in neighbouring Sutton. The Folio Trust has been joined by two Croydon primaries, St Peter’s and Park Hill Junior, which act as feeder schools for Coombe Wood.
The first two years’ intake have spent their entire secondary school careers being taught in temporary cabins on the site as the building work goes on around them. In the past fortnight, parents of Year 6 children, many who must have been eagerly anticipating moving to their shiny new “big school” in September, were sent the news of the delay by Barry Laker, the Coombe Wood head.
“Apologies for not being in touch sooner,” Laker wrote, “but the Department for Education who are responsible for providing us with temporary and permanent building accommodation, have been clear that no information should be made public to parents/carers until their plans were contractually confirmed.”
The plans have been kept so secret, in fact, that there is still nothing about this temporary move on the school’s website or Facebook page, nor on Croydon Council’s website. The MP for the area, Croydon South’s Chris Philp, had also not been informed.
In his missive to parents, Laker said he had been “given the go-ahead” to provide an update on the progress, or lack of it, with the school buildings. Inevitably, he claims that the past three months of covid-19 disruption is to blame for the delay in having the buildings ready, referring to “a significant impact”.
Pleased: Coombe Wood head Barry Laker
“Although the site remained open, sub-contractors working on-site furloughed staff for a significant period of time, resulting in a reduced workforce,” Laker wrote, also claiming that using social distancing “slowed down productivity further”.
“As a result, Wates, the permanent building contractor, has now given us confirmation that they will not be able to deliver the project for September. They have been working incredibly hard to meet deadlines and anyone who has visited the site in the last year will have seen the rapid progress they have made…”.
Laker goes on to state that “in truth, we have been anticipating that this delay would be inevitable as soon as the impact of covid-19 became apparent”. Meaning that they just kept parents in the dark for four months.
“I am pleased to announce we have secured an alternative that will enable students to carry on unhindered with aspects of their academic and extra-curricular work from September onwards,” Laker wrote.
“It is of course hugely disappointing not to be taking up occupancy of our new permanent building in September as planned. However, delays to all aspects of life have been inevitable during this global pandemic that we have been going through and in truth, I am delighted that we are able to avail of the St Andrew’s site as a short-term solution.”
It’ll be nice when it’s finished: the £30m new school that never needed to be built
Parents of pupils at the school are less “delighted” than the headteacher, however.
“This is a big pain for children living in and around Coombe Wood School, as it’s not the easiest of journeys,” one mother told Inside Croydon.
“Many parents of incoming Year 7s are concerned about safety, too, as the main access from South Croydon is via pedestrian underpasses.
“Some parents are beside themselves. I suspect covid gave them a perfect excuse for it not being ready, when the reality was it was never going to be.”
And Tory MP Philp – who has previously lobbied for Croydon South to be allowed to have its own grammar school – says that Coombe Wood’s temporary move into vacant school buildings proves that the whole scheme has been a massive waste of public money.
“From the start, the site choice was a disaster – building on the green space and causing traffic mayhem. The council should never have given planning consent,” Philp said.
“Especially as it now turns out that there is a whole spare site that could have been used instead: St Andrew’s.
“Refurbishing and using St Andrew’s for the new school would have saved millions in ground-up building costs as well as protecting green space.
“It was crazy.”
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And yet another school being envisaged a stone’s throw from St Andrew’s as part of the development of the Heath Clark open space in Waddon.
It just becomes more and more evident that there is no commonsense at the council.
To put Coombe Wood School where they did was a deliberate act of town planning vandalism and waste.
It ruined a wonderful piece of green land, turned life into a misery for hundreds of neighbours and will mess up traffic at rush hour in Coombe Lane. And, in reality, was not necessary at all.
Ah, well, we will have to add Coombe Wood to the illustrious roster of Paul Scott’s and his fellow planners’ illustrious successes along with Westfield, Brick by Brick, the Fairfield Halls and many, many more.
Congratulations!
Archbishop Tenisons wanted to move and build a much less obtrusive school on the far side of the site but were turned down for Green Belt reasons only a year or two before this was approved.
It’s such a big school but so remote from where pupils live that I suspect that Croydon Council have secret plans to build houses/flats on the Shirley side of Lloyd Park fields, or the woods above Oaks Road, despite the covenants to protect them.
When this school first went before the planning committee, Cllr Paul Scott was all over it, gushing forth questions about the impending “school places crisis” in Croydon and other pieces of rhetorical rubbish.
The issue of building on Green Belt was dismissed as quickly as it was raised as Cllr Scott was frothing at the mouth by this stage in his fervour to get this school consented. Scott was hurrying the committee, as a consent was needed in order to ‘face up to the impending crisis’.
Wind the clock forward 18 months and we realise this was all bullshit.
There is no crisis of school places in Croydon.
And building on Green Belt is after all really bloody stupid idea.
Cllr Scott has done a U-turn and now says we shouldn’t build on Green Belt. Indeed he made a token gesture by turning down a housing proposal recently because the landscape proposals were not ‘up to scratch’.
This is merely Scott following the line on Labour’s new “green” agenda after Cllr Jamie Audsley’s recent environmental epiphany.
Of course, Audsley’s green agenda has nothing to do with his new job at the RSPB, where he is now head of Future Nature.
This is the same Cllr Audsley who was one of the planning committee when Cllr Scott instructed to vote in favour of building this very school on Green Belt land.
Yet again Philp reveals himself as a complete and utter humbug.. He has been lobbying for a Grammar school in South Croydon throughout his tenure as an MP. This free school is a Grammar satellite of the Walllington Gramar School. The gullible stooges of Croydon Council have yet again delivered unnecessary disaster and somebody else’s baby. Why don’t you look back to when Chris Philp started to object to this project at Coombe Wood? It certanly didn’t begin at the start of this ill conceived and disastrous waste of money, when such pressure could have and should have killed it at birth. Croydon should really move on from these two groupings of inadequate politicians who always claim to be in opposition, but at the end of the day always deliver the same thing. Failure.
St Andrew’s is located right by the approach section to the Croydon Flyover, so it is not a brilliant place for a school, with all the ambient dust and pollution. I would rather see children being educated in good-qulaity buildings, located places away from main roads, with fresh air and room for lots of outdoor playground space, like the long-vacant Heath Clark site. That does not have to mean building on Green Belt, but looking at all school sites, and if necessary, reallocating land, moving some schools and redeveloping buildings.
What I think deeply wrong is to build schools on small urban sites, without land for a big, “Green” playground , and notably, those built right by main roads, like the Waddon Harris Primary, right on polluted Purley Way.
Ther UK Government, and all Councils really needs to be serious about pollution and playground space. Surely, does not a Council in its role as Plannimng Authority, owe a legal Duty of Care to children and their health?
The healthy location of schools is one thing that a council does have control over.
The cynic in me wonders how easily the new building could be converted into more flats, or is that simply the result of having lived in South Croydon too long?