7:10am Thursday 29th July 2010
By Claire Fox
With Sutton facing a shortage of 400 secondary school places by the end of the decade, the council is pleading with schools to guarantee more places for Sutton children.
A third of all secondary school places in Sutton are going to out of borough children which has left 20 percent of Sutton children having to attend schools in other boroughs.
Councillor Kirsty Jerome said: “Over the years local selective schools have progressively reduced or abandoned any catchment element to their admissions criteria.
“The knock on effect is that our popular comprehensive schools are now also very difficult to gain a place at and you have to live very close to the school to qualify.”
Councillor Jerome said that Sutton school children are facing long journeys to school which makes it harder for them to establish friendship groups and gives them a very long day.
She said: “It is just not fair.”
The council is calling on schools to work with the local authority to review their admissions policies and ensure a greater proportion of Sutton children are offered a place in the borough. It is also asking MPs Paul Burstow and Tom Brake to lobby the Government to reverse the Greenwich Judgement – a legal ruling which prevents maintained schools from giving priority to children for the sole reason that they live within the borough.
Mr Brake said he already had a meeting lined up with schools minister Nick Gibb at the end of August.
He said: “Schools are an important part of the community. I know at least one of the local selective schools finds it difficult to put together a rugby team because the parents don't want to have to travel so far to bring the children in the evenings and at the weekend.”
It is feared that the problem will be exacerbated as birth rates continue to rise, government funding is cut and with 12 Sutton schools expressing an interest in becoming academies and so opting out of local government control.
The council has already warned that it faces a shortage of 400 places by the end of the decade after it lost nearly £300m in promised government funding when the Building Schools for the Future programme was axed earlier this month.
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