One of the concerns most frequently expressed by local residents is the effect of thousands of new homes in East Cambridgeshire on local schools.

The county council is responsible in law for ensuring that there is a school place for every child of school age.  This morning, Cambridgeshire county council’s Economy & Environment Committee will be discussing its response (Item 6 with two appendices) to East Cambridgeshire district council’s revised draft local plan.

So what does the county council think of the revised draft plan for our area?

There will be ‘real challenges’ in supplying school places

It’s clear that the county council thinks we shouldn’t be starting from here.  It responded to the first draft of the district council’s local plan last year, to say that it preferred ‘growth in the main settlements where the proximity to existing infrastructure could be utilised and expanded and the scale of development on individual allocations could support on-site provision of infrastructure’.

But instead of concentrating development in this way, the district council has decided to spread it evenly across East Cambridgeshire, in proportion to the size of each town and village.  The county council says that ‘this option would pose real challenges to managing the effective provision of infrastructure, particularly school places, to meet the additional demands of the new Plan’, and that there will be ‘major implications for the delivery of school places as a consequence of the new spatial strategy’.

A lot of the proposed developments will not be big enough to require a ‘Section 106’ financial contribution by the developer, nor to enable new schools to be built on-site.

Children may have to travel further to school

In the proposed new local plan, a lot more houses are due to be built in smaller villages, and in larger villages such as Fordham, Isleham, Stretham and Witchford where primary schools have no room to expand.  The county council warns that ‘the limited scope for expansion coupled with increasing pupil roles [sic] may in certain settlements result in the need to travel further to access school places’.

The local plan could mean

• Pupils attending schools outside their own village
• Money from developers going to expand schools in neighbouring towns and villages rather than in the community where the houses are being built
• Loss of ‘community cohesion’ as children are bussed to different schools.

A list of primary schools with no room for expansion is at the end of this post.

Providing more secondary school places will be difficult

The revised draft plan will mean four more forms of entry at secondary schools in Ely, four in Soham, and two in Witchford.  A new secondary school will open at Littleport in September.  But even on top of this another two more forms of entry to secondary school may be needed.  The county council says this too will be a ‘real challenge’ in terms of costs and of finding a suitable site if our secondary schools cannot expand enough where they are.

‘In the longer term,’ the county council says, ‘the level of growth in the plan and the impact of future services will have significant capital and revenue implications for a range of Council service.’

Primary schools with no room for expansion

• Cheveley
• Ely St John’s
• Fen Ditton
• Fordham
• Great Wilbraham
• Isleham
• Isle of Ely
• Kennett
• Kettlefields (Dullingham)
• Little Thetford
• Mepal and Witcham
• Spring Meadow Infants and Ely St Mary’s
• Stretham
• Swaffham Bulbeck
• Swaffham Prior
• Teversham
• Rackham (Witchford)
• Weatheralls (Soham)
• Wilburton