Plan aims to protect small schools in Cambridgeshire from being closed down

A new plan to try and protect more small schools from being shut down has been released by Cambridgeshire County Council, writes Hannah Brown, Local Democracy Reporter.

The director of education at the authority, Jonathan Lewis, said they had insufficient funding for schools, but still needed to tackle the challenge of keeping small schools open.

The plan has been put together after the closure of Great Gidding Primary School earlier this year.

The council closed the school after concerns were raised about its future viability due to falling pupil numbers.

A report presented to the council’s children and young people committee on Tuesday, November 28 said there are currently more than 9,700 primary age children attending maintained small schools in Cambridgeshire.

There are 109 schools classed as small among the county’s 210 infant, junior and primary schools, of which 65 are maintained schools and 44 are academies.

Out of the maintained small schools, 49 are designated as rural schools and 31 have a religious designation, with 24 being both classified as a rural school and have a religious designation.

The report said: “Our small schools can offer an outstanding education, be highly valued by parents and play a defining role in the local community.

“However, the very nature of small schools mean they face several unique challenges to being educationally and financially sustainable.”

Under the new strategy all of the county’s small schools will be sorted into red, amber and green categories after being assessed on a number of criteria points.

These points include learning progress and outcomes, catchment forecasts, housing development in the area, and the school’s finances.

Mr Lewis said conversations were already taking place with some schools on how best to support them.

“This is tough, this is a real issue we are tackling. We know our funding is insufficient, we need to tackle it, we need to say yes we know, we are doing something about it to protect our schools from closure,” he said.

Canon Andrew Read said an “unhealthy proportion” of the small schools were diocese schools.

He asked if the “diocese presence” in the strategy document could be “strengthened” as he said the dioceses needed to “share in the challenge”.

Cllr Anna Bradnam (Lib Dem, Milton and Waterbeach) said designating a school as being at risk of closure could impact the number of children attending it.

She asked if officers were confident about the proposed process for schools that are potentially at risk, adding that the authority needed to “build up a school as much as possible before making that decision”.

Officers said under the new plan there would be partnership working with the school to look at all the options before they reached the point of considering putting it at risk of closure.

They said that if it then got to the point that the school was put at risk it should not then be a surprise to anybody involved.

The committee voted to endorse the new small schools strategy and supported its immediate adoption and implementation.