Dear Education Department,
Re:
North Swindon School Place Consultation
I believe that I witnessed
an injustice being perpetrated against Oakhurst families and their children
when I attended the Mouldon Hill consultation session at the Tawny Owl on 23
January 2013 and felt I had to write to you to express my concerns about both
the proposals and the consultation process.
First and foremost I have to
agree that there is a serious shortfall in the number of primary school
reception places in Oakhurst and Redhouse.
We have numerous residents that have reported having their reception age
children placed, against their preference/s, as far away as Rodbourne Cheney, Pinehurst
and West Swindon for the September 2012 academic year. In fact, ORA have been told by Oakhurst
residents that they are thinking of moving or have been forced to move to
secure a local school place for their child.
I must remind you that the
stated need for primary school places, according to SBC’s own documents, is in
Oakhurst and Redhouse. It therefore
seems illogical that the proposal for the new school should be at Taw Hill/Mouldon
Hill and with a consultation taking place in Taw Hill only. Surely if the shortfall is in Oakhurst and
Redhouse then the consultation, at the very least, should have taken place there
to get the views of the residents the school is intended to serve.
There is a risk, in my view,
that holding the consultation in Taw Hill for a proposed school in Taw Hill
will lead to an artificially biased result for the consultation – indeed I
heard one resident for Taw Hill say that the school was in wrong place, and
should not be built on Mouldon Hill Country Park, but she was for it if it
meant her children could get a school place in Taw Hill.
Residents are already aware
that living more than a couple of hundred metres from a school will effectively
make it impossible to get a place in your local school. So how can it be practical or sensible to
build a school so far away from the communities it is purported to be there to
serve? People in Oakhurst, particularly
the ones in the Mayfly Road corner, will have little or no chance of getting
their children into a school at Taw Hill.
The proposed school will more likely be used by families in Mouldon
Bridge, Ridgeway Farm and Taw Hill, all areas substantially closer to the site,
and not the families where you have so clearly documented the need.
I was also concerned that
comments were only being sought for one of the Taw Hill/Mouldon Hill sites,
even though the other sites were being displayed on the maps. Again, these other sites were not shown on
the SBC website and were therefore not freely visible to residents who did not
make it to the consultation in Taw Hill.
This leads one to think that the extra sites were simply there to give
the appearance that there had been other options, when in fact there were
not. At no point did the consultation
survey ask about these other sites or even let residents know that they were a
possibility. This leads me to a worrying
conclusion that they are intended to simply make the consultation look more
exhaustive than it actually is – I hope that this not the case.
With regards to the on-line survey
form, I have to say that I feel that it is a risk to only request a postcode
from residents filling it out. There is
no guarantee that this survey was not open to fraudulent manipulation. What process is in place, for example, to
stop someone submitting multiple responses, either for or against the site, to
manipulate the result of the consultation?
There is no way of determining if the person filling out the on-line
form actually lives at the postcode they have claimed to represent or are
simply using a postcode finder service to identify postcodes in the area to
use.
I have, as I made clear to
you at the consultation event, very strong views about allowing the precedent
of building on a public open space in the Mouldon Hill Country Park. It is not alright for the Borough to attempt
to do something that they would not, one would hope, allow a private developer
to do. However with the recent issues at
Pickard’s Field one has to question this.
If we are to condone the building of a school by SBC on Mouldon Hill
Country Park we are opening up a loophole that developers are sure to
exploit. This was amply demonstrated
with the recent Ridgeway Farm appeal.
The Borough argument that the development should not be built up against
the Swindon border, as SBC wanted to preserve a green buffer between Swindon
and Wiltshire, was turned down by the Planning Inspector as, by building up to
its own border, Swindon had set the precedent for not having a green buffer.
The Mouldon Hill site also
suffers from many other issues – many of which were made clear in the Cabinet
Papers dated 12th December 2012, paragraph 3.23 - “it must be noted that there are potentially a number of issues that
could arise through locating a primary school on the Mouldon Hill site: linked
to access off the dual carriageway and across the Swindon and Cricklade Railway
line, the need to bridge a floodplain to reach the school site and to reroute
power lines that traverse the site. These issues could have a significant
impact on the cost of any new provision on top of the construction costs....”
With reference to the
Redhouse site, you made the statement that it appeared to be too small. Has the option of including a community
facility in the school been considered?
If it was, then the adjacent land earmarked for the community centre
could be utilised as playing pitches for the school site.
Surely it would have made
more sense to have an open and transparent consultation outlining all of the
options available, held in the area the school is supposed to serve, rather
than one outside of the area that only considers one of the many sites shown.
As Chair of ORA, I urge SBC
to reconsider their proposals to build a school on our public open at Mouldon
Hill Country Park. I believe that SBC
should listen to the Oakhurst residents and build a school for Oakhurst
children in Oakhurst.
Yours sincerely,
Paul Exell, Chair of
Oakhurst Residents’ Association
