THREE thousand Beccles residents have demanded to know why £2m of taxpayers money is being spent on a ‘Free School’ with only 68 pupils.
The Department of Education (DoE) says that the ‘Free School’ to be set up in Beccles Suffolk will still open this September, despite the fact that only 68 pupils have registered for it.
There has been an active campaign by anti-free school campaigners. 3,000 residents have opposed the setting up of a ‘free school’.
The Beccles school is one of the 79 ‘Free Schools’ that are due to open this term, compared with 24 last September.
In a letter to Education Secretary Gove, Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg asked for ‘transparency’ over how many of the 79 schools will actually open this term, and how much has been spent on them.
He outlined that £2.3m had been spent on three projects, two of which had been abandoned leaving the Beccles Free School, costing £2m.
The Beccles ‘Free School’ has become a local scandal. There are 10,600 empty secondary school places in Suffolk, so there is no need for another secondary school. Yet the DoE has approved the setting up of four ‘Free Schools’ in the county.
Most of the bids for the ‘Free School’ franchise have come from the Seckford Foundation, which runs a private fee-paying Woodbridge school and residential care homes in Suffolk.
In order to attract pupils in Beccles, they have resorted to offering free school meals, uniforms and iPods.
The Seckford ‘Free School’ aims to take pupils from 11 to 18 years old, and although modifying a temporary site which was a former infant school, plans to move right next door to the Sir John Leman high school by 2014.
l Gove’s plans for schools to be run for profit and to end state education as we know it must be resisted, said Hank Roberts, incoming president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL).
Roberts, who takes over as ATL President on 1st September, says: ‘This September sees the opening of the first Free School being run for profit as part of Michael Gove’s plans to privatise the whole of state education and open it all up for companies to make a profit from our schools.’
He added: ‘If the government resorts to unjust laws parents, teachers and governors will have to consider what actions they can take’.
