Free school must wait for decision

STAFF, pupils and parents at Warrington’s first Free School will have to wait another four weeks to find out if plans for their super new buildings can go ahead.
Members of the borough council’s development management committee have deferred a decision on the controversial scheme to allow time for a site inspection.
This means the scheme will be considered at the committee’s next meeting on June 30.
The plan is for a new 840-place school off Hillock Lane, Woolston for King’s Leadership Academy – currently operating from temporary classrooms at the former Longbarn Primary School.
But it is opposed by Woolston Parish Council, a number of borough councillors and 23 members of the public.
Support for the school has come from 78 people who claim there is great demand for a high quality secondary school in the area – and that it will make Woolston a more desirable place to live.
The two-storey building is planned for the southern end of Woolston Park, to the north of Hillock Lane. It would become the permanent home of the Kings Leadership Academy which, when it opened last year, had 38 pupils.
In addition to classrooms, a school hall, staff rooms, offices and meeting rooms, the new school building would have a library, gymnasium, artificial grass sports pitch, four curt sports hall, football pitch, and three junior sports pitches.
The plan is for the school to open for a longer day than other local schools – from 8.20am to 4.30pm – so as not to clash with the drop-off and pick-up times of the other schools.
Opponents of the development fear traffic and parking problems, loss of open space and playing fields, noise and disturbance, loss of privacy, wildlife habitats, etc.
The most outspoken opposition has come from borough councillor the Rev Steve Parish (pictured), who said: “It is a waste of public money to build a new high school in an area where, self-evidently, the number of pupils cannot sustain a high school without abstracting pupils from other high schools.
“The documentation from the applicant indicates a very limited catchment area, but also, in the transport plan, a diagram suggesting a wider ‘cycle catchment plan’ that extends to include four other high schools in east Warrington.
“It is absolutely immoral for the Department for Education to be willing to fund a new and unnecessary school on ideological grounds but to delay provision of an urgently-needed new building for another school – one that largely serves areas of deprivation in inner Warrington.”
The proposed new school would aim to take on 120 pupils aged 11-18 each year and would have 64 teachers and 32 non-teaching staff members.