New hope for primary school

The shortage of primary school places in St Margarets and East Twickenham has “caused concern among parents for a number of years”, according to Richmond Councillor Malcolm Eady, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services and Education. Now, at long last, there appears to be a solution.

The Council has started the process of purchasing a site for a new primary, infant or junior school, on the now redundant site of St John’s Hospital. The old complex has been divided into 3 sections, the largest of which will be used for the new school. At the moment, it comprises mainly of redundant hospital buildings, but it includes the Grade 2 listed monument, Amyand House. This was named after Claudius Amyand, a surgeon at St George’s Hospital in London, by his family after his death. He is best remembered for performing the first recorded appendectomy, in 1735.

In a recent meeting, the Council was advised that the problem of lack of primary school places is caused by an increased birth rate in the area, combined with a movement of many families from private to state education.

This comes at the same time as the Liberal Democrats in Richmond, who make up just under two thirds of the current Council, have issued a pledge in their manifesto to provide 840 new primary school places after the elections on May 6th, in addition to their current £32m plan to add 1050 new permanent places. According to Councillor Malcolm Eady, the first of these places will be available in September 2011. They have also pledged to provide more secondary school places, a longer-term change that will have to reflect the increased number of state-educated children within the next seven years, as well as to endeavour to raise all of the borough’s secondary schools’ Ofsted reports to Good or Outstanding levels.

However, the leader of the Richmond Conservatives, Councillor Nick True, said that the manifesto was “out of touch and out of time”, although he only specifically criticised the Liberal Democrats’ policies on property development.

Thankfully, the problem seems not to be moving too far out of control. In the recent primary school offers day on 27th March, 80% of parents got into their first choice of school. To those whose children have not yet been allocated a place, Councillor Eady said “we will do everything we can to shorten their anxious wait. We guarantee places for Richmond children; we have always met this guarantee.”