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Archive for January 17th, 2009
One of the many misconceptions that the Salford Labour Party has been happy to let spread over the past two years is that the provision of four Roman Catholic High Schools across the City of Salford is unsustainable.
Reference is often made to the closure of numerous RC Schools across the City in decades past. I wasn’t on the Council at the time to debate the rights and wrongs of those decisions, but what I do know is that they were taken against a very different demographic background to the one we face now – falling rolls and significant depopulation from inner-city Salford. For a graphic illustration, just look at the huge disparities in local government ward electorates in 2003, before the current boundaries were introduced.
That’s simply not the case any more. All four RC High Schools have relatively stable rolls and in the case of St George’s and St Ambrose Barlow are actually turning pupils away by the busload.
All four schools are perfectly financially viable as well. Indeed, we looked at school balances on Wednesday at Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee and all four RC High Schools are running a surplus and are projected to do continue to do so. St George’s, remarkably given the current situation, is one of only two schools in the City with an all-black balance sheet with no past deficits nor projected future deficits (the other is ICCHS).
Contrast that with some of the community schools which have built up socking great deficits – over £2 million at Harrop Fold and £1.5 million at Hope High before it closed (incidentally that money has been written off and all the other schools will have to take the hit – a scandal and injustice in itself).
Nor is the size of the respective schools a problem. One of the more spurious arguments put forward by the Labour Party for closing St George’s was the Government’s supposed reluctance to release BSF money for smaller-sized schools – yet All Hallows will now receive a full rebuild under the current proposals without increasing in size.
So the viability of St George’s or any other RC School is not in question. So I ask again, why do we need to close down a successful high school?
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