Issue - meetings

Purpose of report

The purpose of this report is to provide an update on the progress of:

•         Urgent school condition projects

•         Mainstream school sufficiency schemes aimed at increasing school place capacity within the city

•         Special school sufficiency schemes aimed at ensuring that schools can take children with more complex learning needs.

Recommendations

1.    It is recommended that the Cabinet Member notes the progress on the school modernisation "urgent condition" projects, the secondary school sufficiency projects and the special school sufficiency projects.

2.    It is recommended that the schemes agreed with the Lead Member since the last report are formally approved.

The report was introduced by Chris Williams, Pupil Place Planning & Capital Strategy Officer. 

Despite it being a challenging year Chris was pleased so say that all parties had worked really hard in completing the projects to increase school places at Trafalgar School, Admiral Lord Nelson School, Charter Academy, The Portsmouth Academy and St Edmund's Catholic School, with little if any disruption to pupils starting their new school provision in September.

Chris advised that the planning application for the new 66 place special free school in Wymering was due to be submitted in December, however this will be delayed slightly due to a pre consultation exercise which now means it will be submitted in January 2021.  It was explained that due to a historic right of way being identified across the site entrance area in favour of the NHS, a sum has been identified within the existing capital programme to re provide the area and enable the right of way to be surrendered.

In response to questions Chris explained that the £600,000 allocated to highway works and car parking at Admiral Lord Nelson School was due to having to relocate the car park from the front of the school back towards the side entrance. In addition to that there has been some work done with highways as part of the planning process to change the access point that comes out onto the main highway. The access arrangements in the earlier scheme weren't considered to be sufficient for the needs of the highway and therefore a lot of work went into the redesign exercise which unfortunately costs the additional sum of money identified. Chris confirmed that the additional money had to come out of the school places funding as it was part of the education project.

Mike Stoneman stated that this was not uncommon and many of the big capital projects over the last few years around sufficiency have often involved these additional works.  It is something that the government recognise when they allocate basic new funding to councils for sufficiency schemes as they do often impact on highway schemes.

With regards to the apparent shortage of places of early secondary school and the possibility of pupils not getting their first choice schools Chris advised that the increase in primary school numbers had started to impact on the secondary schools last year which showed the need to put in the additional places this year. The additional places for the five secondary schools mentioned within the report will start to put a lot more capacity into the city and that also brings with it greater parental choice. Chris was certain that there will be enough capacity at a secondary level to cope with the year 6 numbers coming through, although there is not a great deal of surplus capacity at secondary level. By working closely with a number of schools they are looking to see how they can put in more flexible spaces which are not permanent expansions but are more cost effective  ...  view the full minutes text for item 15