Parents fear the school places shortage in Cambridge, which means secondary pupils travelling 15 miles out of the city, will not improve for next year’s intake.
And they are demanding to know what plans Cambridgeshire County Council has to increase secondary school provision in the city in the short term.
This year, 111 children have not been given one of their three preferences for secondary school, as the Cambridge Independent revealed last week. Instead they were allocated places miles away from their home address, with some Cambridge children given schools in St Ives or St Neots.
This has been compounded by 300 extra places that had initially been planned for 11 to 16-year-old pupils at Chesterton Community College effectively being taken away by the Department for Education when capacity for a sixth form was approved.
Cllr Antoinette Nestor (Lab, Darwin Green) says: “I know of many children in my ward who did not get into one of their three choices of school and will now have to travel across town or out of the city.
“My concern is that children in Years 4 and 5 of primary school at the moment could be facing exactly the same problem because of the lack of secondary school places in the city.
“In Darwin Green, which I represent, the secondary school cannot be built until phase two of the development goes ahead and that is currently going through a planning appeal, so we don’t know if it will be built in time for the children to go there.
“We understand that the county council had made provision to cater for the growing need for secondary school places in the city and allocated £10m to fund further classrooms at Chesterton Community College for 11 to 16-year-old provision, but a sixth form was built instead.”
A county council spokesperson explained: “The county council provided 300 additional places at Chesterton Community College and spent £10m on that expansion. The Department for Education then subsequently approved Chesterton’s application for a sixth-form which effectively took that 11-16 capacity away.”
However, the spokesperson added that the council had offered 87.9 per cent of students a place at their first-choice school in Cambridgeshire this year, up from 87.1 per cent last year.
Some school proposals are in the pipeline that will increase the number of secondary school places available, the spokesperson added.
“There are two schemes currently under construction to expand secondary schools in South Cambridgeshire which will provide additional places from September 2024.
“Cambourne Village College will be extended by 600 places for pupils aged 11-16 with a new sixth-form of 350 places.
“The second phase of Northstowe Secondary College will provide another 600 places for pupils aged 11-16 and 400 sixth-form places.
“The council has plans to build a new secondary school of 600 places for pupils aged 11-16 (with capacity to go to 900) on the Darwin Green development. The new school is expected to open in September 2026.
“The current pressures on secondary admissions are largely because of an increase in the number of births across the area (and the country) between 2010 and 2015. These children are now moving into secondary schools.
“New housing developments do have some impact on numbers but are not the main driver.
“For September 2024, we expect more places to become available as some allocated places are declined. We are confident that very few, if any, city children will have to be transported to other schools.
“We do expect another relatively high intake in September 2025 and we will continue to work with local schools to manage this.”
Last year, the council’s children and young people committee published a report saying “the council will only consider commissioning new schools where there is no possible alternative” because “opening a new school or extending an existing one is expensive”.
It added: In addition to the capital investment, the council is responsible for all pre-opening start-up costs in respect of new basic need schools, including diseconomy of scale costs, funding for which may be needed over several years. The pre-opening and diseconomy costs are met from the Dedicated Schools Grant, so although are a cost, they are effectively being subsidised by all other schools in Cambridgeshire rather than core funding.”
As a result the council updated its forecasting tools to predict more accurately the number of school places required for any new development. It added that accurate predictions were essential “to avoid exposing the council to the risk of a capital funding shortfall and insufficient developer contributions requiring additional council borrowing”.
The report adds: ”Developers are only required to fund the level of new places required to mitigate the impact of their developments. If the council’s child yield multipliers do not reflect accurately the situation in the county, there is a risk that education capital projects will be under-resourced.”
A spokesperson for the Eastern Learning Alliance, which runs Chesterton Community College, said the college has taken on more students each year that planned for in its Pupil Admission Number (PAN).
“We have currently offered 190 places to Year 6 students, with an expectation that up to 20 additional students will be placed at Chesterton as part of the EHCP process. In addition, a number of students will rightly win their appeals for places with us. The combined impact of this is that Chesterton is operationally full,” the spokesperson said.
“The sixth form was agreed by the Department for Education to serve young people in the local community at that point and in the future. This decision was predicated on place planning data collated at local authority level, which included the delivery of Darwin Green secondary school as planned. This data showed that additional sixth-form places were required (and continue to be), and Year 6 places were not. It continues to be the case that there has been no growth in student numbers in the Year 6 cohorts at our feeder primary schools.
“Going forward we will continue to seek to over-admit every year to support as many families as possible, and know that the planned opening of Darwin Green secondary continues to be the overall solution to the current issues with place planning locally.”
