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School Buildings (Alnwick)

In March 2004, when he was Chancellor, the Prime Minister made an important promise. I heard him say:""Our capital investment allocations will ensure for every constituency in the country that by 2015 every secondary school can be refurbished or rebuilt with world class technology in every school and the best state of the art learning support in every classroom."" He has not forgotten that promise. Indeed, he repeated it at the Labour party conference last year when he said that""over the next decade"" —that sounds as if the timetable was slipping—""we will rebuild or refurbish not some but all secondary schools"." I have raised this issue previously in Adjournment debates and questions, but today I want to draw the Minister's attention again to the fact that there is no sign whatsoever that that rebuilding is happening, or will happen, in my constituency. In particular, there is no sign that it will happen in Alnwick, where the buildings of the Duchess's community high school are in a deplorable state, despite the school's great achievements in the standard of education that it provides. Of the other schools in Alnwick, some have serious problems with their buildings—Alnwick South first school, in particular. I understand that the lease for the Dukes middle school has expired, and it is operating on a year-to-year basis. Let me provide some background. Northumberland is the sixth largest county in England, but with 310,000 people it has one of the smallest populations. Nearly half the population live in 3 per cent. of the land area, in the urban corner. That distribution of population and those small numbers make it a difficult authority in which to provide a full range of schools for every part of the county. For some time, the education authority has been seeking to change the basic structure, which is a three-tier system with transfer at ages nine and 13. That system was originally devised to suit the buildings of the time and the post-war secondary modern schools, which in most cases formed the middle schools within that system. There are sharply divided views about whether that is a good or bad system. My experience is that although the middle schools worked well, 13 is not a good age for transfer to high school, and a number of problems tend to flow from that. The county has been looking to restructure the system, but that is not really the reason why we have problems in replacing the Duchess's school in Alnwick, and the other schools in the town. Let me explain the problems in more detail. The main site of the Duchess's high school—which incidentally is one of only three secondary schools in my constituency— is made up of buildings from the 1950s and 1960s. It is on a split site, which I will talk about in more detail in a moment. The school was built for 900 pupils but now has 1,131. The dining hall seats 200 people, but over 1,000 have to use it in the space of a lunchtime. The fire certificate for the hall gives 300 as the maximum number, but that will not even accommodate the entire sixth form for an assembly. There are 13 mobile classrooms; 13 science teachers share eight science labs. The heating system is old and inefficient, which adds massively to school running costs, particularly when fuel prices go up. It would be an expensive system to replace, and that might not be a sensible use of money when we are all hoping to see the school housed in completely new buildings. As I said, the school is on a split site, which creates enormous problems. Many things, such as caretaking and cleaning provision, have to be duplicated. There are two boilers, both of which are ancient and in need of replacement. Much time is lost by staff and students in moving between buildings; pupils lose about an hour a week of teaching time in transferring between the two sites. There are great difficulties in timetabling across the two sites. There are safety problems because students have to cross two streets when going between the two sites. In bad weather, students who change sites twice a day might spend a large part of the day in wet clothing, which is not conducive to learning or to maintaining a good environment in the school. The Bailiffgate building is a four-storey Georgian building built as a domestic residence, which is in poor condition. The music rooms, one of which is a cupboard, are not soundproofed or suitable for teaching. The building is not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995—it is a profoundly unsatisfactory location in which to be carrying out education. Land has been identified for a replacement school. Within the local community, there is a clear understanding that that is where the school needs to be—not just the Duchess's high school, but an education campus that accommodates a number of the other schools on the same site. There have been discussions with the biggest landowner in the town, the Duke's estate—Northumberland Estates—but those have not reached a conclusion or brought about an alternative solution to the normal ways of solving the problem of replacing a school. Ironically, the school's academic success is a handicap to getting its buildings replaced. Teachers and pupils achieve remarkable results in an unconducive environment, but that success tends to mean that the school does not appear in the right column in the figures that are necessary to get on the various schemes. Ofsted describes the Duchess's high school and specialist college as a""good and improving school with outstanding features. Students make good progress in their studies, and the care, guidance and support they receive is excellent…Personal development is excellent and the school has other strengths such as the partnerships with parents and links with other schools. There are many examples of students making very strong contributions to the community, for example through music, drama, and vocational course activities.""Leadership and management are good. Senior managers are steering the school well and capacity to improve is very good. The governing body monitors the school's performance and makes sure it continues to move forward. Resources are effectively deployed to achieve good value for money. Parents, staff, and students are highly concerned about the accommodation and say many aspects are no longer fit for purpose."." In the last month or two, the school has been badly affected by the loss of teachers who died suddenly—one used to teach with my wife and it was a sudden and unexpected death. Two former students, both teenagers who had recently left school, were killed in separate road accidents. That has been a very sad experience for the school, and the school's management team have been praised for the way that they have handled that difficult situation. There is enormous community concern about the state of the school, and support for new buildings at the Greensfield site, which adjoins excellent sports facilities alongside the cricket, football and rugby clubs. There is a recognised way forward with a site that has been identified, and community support. So what do we do? There are a number of possible schemes through which the school could be taken forward. Building Schools for the Future is the centrepiece of the Government's programme for replacing schools. However, the Duchess's high school tends to do badly in that programme, as it is predicated on results and the school receives good results. That scheme is also predicated on deprivation, and although the school sits alongside the most deprived area in the Alnwick district, the overall catchment area is not deprived enough to rate highly on the scales that are used. What is the situation with Building Schools for the Future? Northumberland county council submitted an expression of interest to Partnerships for Schools in November 2008. Since then, it has been told that it comes 31st in the ranking order for future waves, but apparently it has not heard anything further about how it should start to engage with the BSF programme. We are not even at stage zero of the BSF process, and stages zero and one take between two and three years to carry out. The Duchess's high school is part of what is called a hard federation. The Duchess's high school, Lindisfarne middle school, the Dukes middle school and Alnwick South first school have one governing body. Theoretically, that should make it easier to move to one site, and whether that happens in the existing three-tier structure or a reorganised structure, such a decision is not an impediment to going ahead. Building can proceed on the site whether or not reorganisation has been agreed on. If we cannot act through Building Schools for the Future, what are the alternatives? The national challenge programme is similarly restricted, and once again, the Alnwick schools do too well academically to qualify. What about the academy system? Again, that possibility has been explored locally, but when a possible academy solution was explored, it turned out that the locality was not deprived enough. Although academy schools went ahead in the south-east of the county—where they were quite controversial, and there was considerable opposition to the scheme—that route was also closed to us. The education authority then considered alternative ways to find the capital necessary to carry out the rebuilding. Its medium-term capital programme for 2008-09 to 2011-12 included £33 million for investment in schools in Alnwick town. The inclusion of the scheme in the capital programme was based on the assumption that it could be financed through a combination of land sales and county council borrowing, but the current financial and economic situation has had a significant impact on the scheme. The downturn in the housing and land markets means that developers are not acquiring sites, which has had a serious effect on the value of the county's asset portfolio. It would not be sensible for the county to dispose of land assets when prices are at an historic low. At the same time, the council is facing the need to make significant revenue savings in the medium term, so it is less able to provide revenue funding to support significant borrowing in its capital programme. That has affected any financing of Alnwick schools directly from the county's programme and land sales. The authority has taken no decisions about the future structure of Alnwick schools. It has said that it will reconsider its reorganisation programme, Putting the Learner First, for the Alnwick pyramid, but it will not spend money on doing so or raise expectations of progress unless it can identify the money for building the new school on which any reorganisation would depend. Again, however, I insist that that need not be a barrier to progress on the building of a new school. That can go ahead regardless of the future structure, because the age range would be on the same site in either form of solution. The previous Schools Minister promised that he would visit the Duchess's school, but was unable to meet that promise before completing his period in office. He has now been moved to other duties. We need a ministerial visit, and I am hopeful that the Minister will agree to one, so that Ministers can see for themselves how difficult the situation is. I am glad that the Minister of State is here to reply to this debate. Will she identify how we can make progress in securing the implementation of the Prime Minister's promise? The Prime Minister clearly believes that every secondary school in the country should be rebuilt or refurbished within a period that requires a decision to be made now if Alnwick is to fall within it. Unless we make a decision soon, we shall reach the end of the period that he identified only last year without doing so. Can either Building Schools for the Future or the academy scheme be interpreted so as to accommodate a situation that clearly requires action? A school in as poor a physical condition as the Duchess's high school cannot be expected to continue in that way, and it would be negligent in the extreme if clear plans were not made to replace it with a school that serves its purpose, is efficient to run and does not involve unnecessary maintenance costs, which will mount greatly the longer the school stays on its present site. How will that be achieved? That is the question that the Minister must answer for us. We are running out of time to get an answer.