Searching for a site
It's becoming increasingly clear that one of the biggest hurdles our group faces is finding a site. We don't yet know what our admissions policy will be -- it will depend on which party is in power when we open for admissions and what criteria parent-sponsored academies are allowed to adopt. But to be on the safe side we're looking for a site that's in or near Acton.
The way we’ve gone about the search is to circle an area on the A-Z and then divide it into several sections, with each member of the steering committee being assigned a particular zone. Then, armed with notebooks and cameras, we’ve got on our bikes.
Our task has been complicated by the fact that we don’t have a clear idea of what we were looking for. We intend to admit four forms of 27 every year so when our school is at full capacity it will contain 756 students, including the sixth form. That means we need approximately 90,000 square feet of floor space -- ideally next to some playing fields
However, beyond that we’re less certain. Our aim is to set up a parent-sponsored academy and under the present rules new academies are eligible for large capital grants. From that point of view, an ideal site would be 2.5 acres of open land that we can stick a brand new building on. But if the Conservatives win the election, the pot of money available to new academies will probably be a lot smaller. In that scenario, we’ll be better off with an existing building that we can either rent or buy.
In the end, we decided it would be sensible to look for sites in both categories and we've come up with a shortlist of about a dozen. I'm meeting with Ealing's planning department on January 29 to see which of these the council regards as most suitable. Securing planning permission for a new secondary school is difficult, not least because local residents tend to get understandably nervous about an invasion of 756 adolescents. On the other hand, having a high-performing state school on your doorstep usually adds at least £10,000 to the value of your property.
Obviously, we’d prefer a brand new school, designed to our own specifications, but if we have to set up shop in an office building, so be it. As far as we're concerned, the important thing is getting the ethos and the curriculum right, with the attractiveness of the building a secondary consideration. In Sweden, where parents have been allowed to set up state schools since 1992, renting commercial office space for educational purposes is common practice. Indeed, the most successful Swedish free school company, Kunskapsskolan, has a policy of always renting, never buying.
The other reason for not being too fussy about the site is that we still want to admit our first cohort of students in 2011. Many of the people in our group have children in Year Five and if the West London Free School doesn’t open in 2011 it’ll be too late for them.
