Expansion plans for Cobham Free School came under scrutiny during a parliamentary debate at the House of Commons.

Dominic Raab, MP for Esher and Walton, questioned Mela Watts, director of free schools group at the Department for Education (DfE), during a debate at the education committee on Wednesday, February 5, about the criteria for needing a free school.

Ms Watts said the DfE looked at three points; basic need, the demand from parents and the quality of other provisions in the area.

Making reference to Cobham Free School, Mr Raab explained the basic need and demand for the school in the area, but criticised the decision to permit the secondary phase of the school alongside the building of 500 new homes on greenbelt land.

He said: “When we came to look at finding a site, the Education Funding Agency (EFA) identified a site in collaboration with a developer, and the quid pro quo was 500 new homes, which struck many as immediately eating up the demand that was otherwise going to be plugged.

“What analysis do you do in that kind of scenario of how the extra supply is going to be offset by, for example, a sponsoring developer who is going to create more demand? It struck us that no analysis of that had taken place.”

Mr Raab also said the local authority had not been consulted on the plans and asked whether the amount of places the school had on offer would change based on the demand from residents of the new homes.

Ms Watts said: “That certainly is part of the consideration in trying to identify what I described as need: Seeing what sort of timeframe that development will be built over, and what the local authority thinks the likely population and target customer will be.”

Speaking after the debate, Mr Raab said: “We sorely need extra secondary school places in Elmbridge and particularly in Cobham. I would love to see a free school built following the innovative example of the primary free school in Cobham.

“But it makes no sense locally to build a new school coupled with a housing development on the greenbelt, where all or most of the new places would be inundated by new demand from the extra development.

“On the one hand the EFA say they conduct estimates of the extra school places required for any such development. Yet, when I’ve asked the EFA for these estimates they have not been forthcoming. It just doesn’t look like the EFA have done their basic homework.”

Plans for the secondary school, which would be linked to the existing primary school at the old police station in Portsmouth Road, were unveiled in November last year.

A planning application is expected in the coming months, with applications for year 7 places already closed.

At an exhibition of the plans, Howard Morris, chairman of governors at Cobham Free School, said there was “no room for failure” and the school expected to open on the new site in September 2015.