Five schools escape as axe falls on rebuilding

Published: 09 July, 2010
by RÓISÍN GADELRAB

WORK will go ahead at every Islington school marked for rebuilding, despite Education Secretary Michael Gove taking an axe to the nationwide scheme this week.

Four schools – Highbury Grove, Holloway, Samuel Rhodes and St Aloysius – have already been completed, while Islington Council has been told that those schools in phases two and three of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme will be unaffected by the cuts.

This means Central Foundation, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Highbury Fields, Mount Carmel and New River College Pupil Referral Unit will all be refurbished or rebuilt.

Contracts had already been agreed for these schools, safeguarding the work. But Mr Gove said: “I will continue to look at the scope for savings in all these projects.”

Islington, which was in wave two of the government’s rebuilding plans, was so far ahead with its scheme that it was decided the rest of the programme could go ahead. Developer Balfour Beatty has won the contract for work in the borough.

The news is not so good for neighbouring Camden where cash for all but two schools has been withheld.

Islington Labour education chief Councillor Richard Watts said: “It’s an enormous relief that Islington has escaped the Tory-Lib Dems’ cull of new school projects. More than 700 new school projects across the country have been scrapped, which will be an appalling blow to the affected communities.”

He added: “Islington will keep its new schools because of the highly professional work of our officers working on BSF and because the Labour government prioritised deprived inner-city areas like Islington to get the first new schools.” 

He said the coalition government did not have a similar commitment to Islington, which was why cuts to education spending are among the highest in London. “No one is of the opinion that the level and speed of the cuts which the Tory-Lib Dem government are making is in any way necessary,” he said. “This is a clear ideological choice.”

Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman Councillor Paula Belford, said the news contrasted with Labour’s previous predictions that the borough’s BSF projects would face the axe.

She said: “Major improvements will definitely take place at these Islington schools. 

“We’ve already seen the fantastic new buildings at the four schools completed so far and we look forward to the same high standards for students in the last phase. These works will mean all the borough’s secondary schools will have been rebuilt or refurbished by 2013.

“Labour should be ashamed of itself for trying to scare students, staff and parents into thinking these improvements were not going ahead.”