Ed Balls attacks Tories over new school bid

Published: 29 April 2010
by RICHARD OSLEY

EDUCATION Secretary Ed Balls delivered an election broadside at Camden’s Conservatives on Tuesday for not speeding up plans to open a new secondary school south of the Euston Road.

He also warned that the Tories could shelve refurbishment projects planned for 13 of Camden’s existing secondary schools if their national colleagues get to form a new government next week. 

Any plans that haven’t been signed off already, Mr Balls warned during a flying visit to the Marchmont Street Community Centre, would not be guaranteed by a Conservative government.

He added that Labour’s celebrated schools investment programme, Building Schools for the Future, could be drained of funding if Mr Balls’ Tory counterpart Michael Gove takes his job.

“They are not guaranteeing any of what has been planned will actually happen,” Mr Balls added.

Ironically, Mr Balls was taking aim at a local authority which will deliver one of the most anticipated examples of his government’s controversial policy of creating independently-run new schools.

The UCL Academy, which will operate beyond the traditional control of the council, is due to open in Swiss Cottage next year.

Yet Mr Balls is angry that an offer from his department to work on another new school in Camden, somewhere in the southern wards of the borough where parents have struggled to find secondary education for their children decades, has been ignored.

He said the “tea had gone cold and the biscuits gone soft” while the Lib Dem and Tory administration in Camden dragged its feet and failed to meet him. A site has been identified in Wren Street, Holborn, but work on transforming it into a four-form school has been slow going.

Mr Balls told the New Journal: “I’ve had Conservative MPs saying to me, ‘can you sign this off quickly so we can make sure it gets done before the next government’, and I’ve had to say, ‘sorry, you will have to vote Labour to make sure it  happens’. In Camden’s case, we have put the offer that if it can show there is a need for school places we will provide a new school, but they haven’t come forward to meet us.”

Mr Balls said the Tories were promising parents the chance to open schools of their own without saying where the money would come from.

But Camden’s Conservative education chief Councillor Andrew Mennear said it was a government survey – not council research – that would prove the case for a new school in the area.

“The pupil projection figures are done centrally, not by the council,” said Cllr Mennear. “This is scaremongering due to the election. We all want a new school there but it is not us that is causing the delay. It is Conservative policy to make it much easier to open new schools. This is desperate from Ed Balls. It comes to something when he has to come to help Frank Dobson out in a constituency which was once a Labour heartland.”