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Christmas Adjournment

If modern buildings and state-of-the-art facilities are the ingredients to make a school successful, then Bishops Park college at Clacton would have been the jewel in the crown of Essex county council. However, it lasted little more than five years before it was judged to be a failure, with some of the poorest examination results in Essex. Projected figures for pupil admissions did not materialise. Who is now paying for this colossal miscalculation? The college was a costly private finance initiative project; I understand the cost totalled £30 million, a debt which, no doubt, the public purse continues to pay excessively to service. Bishops Park has now merged with another secondary school in Clacton, and has become an academy. It is one of five secondary schools in Essex transferred to the Academies Enterprise Trust—whose patron at the time of the transfers was, by an extraordinary coincidence, the Conservative leader of Essex county council. I think that the Department for Children, Schools and Families should hold an investigation into that trust, which has also taken over other secondary schools in different parts of the country. It looks more like a business operation using state funds and state-funded buildings. It is based on an industrial estate next to Hockley railway station. Bishops Park is not in my constituency, but the relevance to Colchester is this: the same idiotic forward planning by Essex county council threatens future secondary school provision in Colchester, which is the fastest growing borough in the country. Whereas at Clacton the county council hopelessly overestimated the number of pupils, leaving it with the white elephant of the most modern secondary school buildings in Essex, at Colchester, the incompetence is in the opposite direction—a woeful underestimate of pupil numbers, which is being used to justify the closure of two secondary schools in south Colchester in what is, I repeat, the fastest-growing borough in the country. The latest figure that I have, provided by Colchester borough council's strategic policy unit, shows that there were 1,932 live births in Colchester in 2006, an increase of 276 a year since 2001. The population of Colchester is expected to grow by 30.9 per cent. to 223,500 people by 2021, a population increase of more than 3,000 people every year. Despite that, Essex county council claims that the number of children of secondary school age will fall. The truth is the opposite. In the "south growth area"—that is, the CO2 postcode area, where the two threatened schools are located—the number of new dwellings totals 3,000, to be built in the period 2001 to 2021. How does that square with the county's contention that there are not enough children in south Colchester to justify the continuation of the two secondary schools? The consequence of the county's idiotic strategy is that two communities will each lose their community school, in direct contravention of the Government's declared policies, such as the sustainable communities and safe routes to school initiatives. Hopefully, the Government will find the determination to intervene and prevent the closures when they know that the county council's case is based on false statistics. The closures will create a postcode lottery of secondary school provision in Colchester, with no secondary schools in postcode CO2, but six in CO3 and two in CO4, with the forward planning people of Essex county council—yes, there are some sensible officers at county hall—already intimating that there will be a need for a third secondary school in CO4 to cater for the huge housing developments planned in north Colchester. As I stated, however, there is also massive new development in south Colchester, principally at the former Colchester garrison. A quick look at the map shows the stupidity of closing two schools in this part of Colchester and consequently hugely expanding Philip Morant school, possibly to as many as 2,500 pupils, and Stanway school, with some 500-plus children being bussed across town during the busiest times of the day when, like most other towns, there is already huge traffic congestion. Does it make financial sense at any time, but particularly when there are huge pressures on public expenditure, to spend millions on expanding schools while closing others? As we saw with Bishops Park, it is not new buildings which make a good school. It is the quality of the leadership, the teachers and other staff, and the ethos. This may appear to be purely a local matter, but it has national significance because it highlights—