Fears for school places

Fears have been raised there will be inadequate secondary school facilities in the Newark area in years to come unless the possibility of 5,000 new homes for the town is taken into account.

Work on a new Grove School in Balderton is expected to start in January, 2011 as part of a multi-million pound schools’ redevelopment programme.

The existing school will be demolished and rebuilt on its London Road site.

The project will be paid for from £150m available to Nottinghamshire County Council as part of the Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.

But the MP for Newark, Mr Patrick Mercer, is concerned that the impact of the Growth Point bid, which may mean 5,000 new homes being built south of Newark, was not considered as part of the plans for investment in schools.

Mr Mercer said a dramatic increase in the population of Newark through the Growth Point bid would obviously mean an increase in the number of children.

Mr Mercer feared that in ten or 15 years there would be too few school places for the number of children.

“This school work is at last on the starting line and then we are told there is absolutely no allocation made in the size of the Newark schools for the extended population.

“What am I to make of that?” said Mr Mercer.

“It is like a woman pregnant with twins buying a Mini.”

Mr Mercer said he had seen the benefits of improvements made to schools in Tuxford and Retford and wanted the same in Newark.

“The resources at the Newark schools over the last decade have been inadequate,” he said.

“If we are not careful we will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

A spokesman for the county council said there were certain rules for the Building Schools for the Future programme and the details they provided had to be based on facts and figures available at the time.

She said planning permission had not been granted for the Growth Point bid so it could not be taken into account.

She said they could not use future projections.

“These are the Government’s rules, not those of the county council,” said the spokesman.