Press release issued By Standards Not Tiers on behalf of St Helen’s, Yarmouth and Chale Primary Schools SOS Action Groups
On Monday 8th September delegates from St Helen’s, Chale and Yarmouth Primary Schools held a meeting in St Helens, which was attended by Representatives of NASS, (National Association for Small Schools) and SNT (Standards-Not-Tiers).
Left to right: Sarah Edmunds, Chris Welsford, Miranda Botha, Mervyn Benford, Chris Farnsworth, Alison Bacon, Patrick Joyce, Lisa Dyer, Owen Toms, Caroline Diamond, Jonathan Bacon.
Speakers discussed the Isle of Wight Council proposals for the reorganisation and closure of schools, which are amongst the smallest and most successful in the country and agreed to offer assistance to all Island schools that are threatened with closure, both primary and middle.
Mervyn Benford of the NASS explained to group the duties and responsibilities of the Local Authority to present balanced and accurate information. Mr Benford, who has most recently been instrumental in helping to reverse the mass school closure proposals in Hereford and Worcester, Cumbria and Shropshire, outlined the basis for a legal challenge to the Isle of Wight Council’s plans to close 23 of the Isle of Wight’s 61 schools.
Caroline Diamond from St Helens SOS said:
“We have learned from Mervyn that there is a statutory duty to provide adequate and sufficient information to enable intelligent consideration and response, in other words to present both sides of the argument. I think we all feel that IW Council has failed in its duty to do that”
The group were shown evidence to support the argument that small schools produce some of the best results in the United Kingdom.
Mr Benford said that claims made by Steve Beynon at the St Helens’ consultation meeting that “small schools are more vulnerable to variable performance” were not supported by any published evidence.
In fact all the evidence points to the great success of small schools all over the world. He went on to tell the group that Council’s
“must provide evidence for their claims. It is simply not good enough for them to make unsubstantiated statements in public which they later have to refute in private or cannot support with evidence. The Government guidelines are very clear the local authority must not use language which could be misinterpreted and they must provide adequate time sufficient information to enable respondents to give informed responses “.
Mr Benford presented a weight of evidence to support the retention of small schools as effective community based learning centres. The group learned that the 2005 “State of the Countryside” report to parliament by the Commission for Rural Communities studied schools test data and reported that “the best primary school results came from schools with under 100 on their rolls” and that closures and amalgamations compromise the identity and autonomy of local communities.
Very relevant to the Isle of Wight was evidence from The Scottish Executive in August 2006, following deep analysis of both performance and socio economic factors, that “the smaller the school the better were the outcomes”.
They discovered the children from the smallest schools had a “25% better chance of reaching university”. They also found that “children from impoverished, disadvantaged families made progress where their counterparts educated in larger schools remained an often expensive cadre of under achieving disaffected pupils”.
Ofsted Inspections and results from St Helens, Chale and Yarmouth and many other small primary and middle schools, lend support to these findings and the group resolved to do all they can to fight the Isle of Wight council and prevent the closure of these schools.
Chris Welsford, Chairman for SNT, said:
“It is wonderful to have the full support of the NASS. They have years of experience in fighting local authority plans to close small schools. They have the evidence we need, to show that the Council has got this wrong.
We are now able to prepare a solid legal case to challenge the council in the courts where they refuse to provide the evidence to back up their claims, particularly in respect of small scale education and the impact that closures will have on communities.
The Council have consistently argued that small schools are ineffective when the truth is completely the reverse and we can prove it. One way or the other, we will stop the council from closing schools on the Isle of Wight, whether it be through the courts or through the ballot box”
