By Cllr Prue Bray
Wokingham’s schools are experiencing huge demand for school places at the moment.
We have welcomed nearly 500 children from Hong Kong into our schools locally in the past year, along with approximately 100 Ukrainian children, and refugees from elsewhere.
That is an enormous number of children to add into the system, with almost certainly many more to come. And nobody was expecting them.
It is hard for parents to understand why they cannot get a place for their child at their nearest school. It is just as hard for people hosting Ukrainian refugees to understand why a Ukrainian child living in the same house cannot go to the same school as their own children.
But unfortunately our schools are almost completely full, with no spaces at all in some year groups in the entire borough. And the law does not allow us to give Ukrainian children places ahead of everyone else.
The council has an obligation to make sure all the of the school age in the borough get an education. It is doing its best to find the money to build classrooms and other facilities to make sure there are enough school places, even if they are not always where parents and carers would ideally wish them to be.
The council is finding the money for the extra buildings largely by shifting current budgets around. There is no spare money to spend on existing school buildings.
The financial pressure on schools is just as great.
The majority of their money comes from the government and is paid per child in the school. But the calculation for the number of children in the school is only done once a year. So that means that our schools are educating hundreds of additional students this year without having seen any extra income.
The government has promised there will be money for the Ukrainian children’s education, but no-one has yet received any and we don’t know how or when it will be paid.
That paints a very gloomy picture. But it is not all doom and gloom.
We are very fortunate that schools are largely working with the council to seek to provide the extra places that are needed.
The council cannot force schools to do this. Many of the schools in our borough are academies, and completely separate from the council. We are very grateful to them for co-operating with us in the interests of our children.
It is that spirit of co-operation that gives us the way forward. The council has to work with our schools, who also have to work in partnership with each other. Sometimes those partnerships are formal, in that quite a few of our schools have combined together into various multi-academy trusts.
Sometimes they arise simply from a willingness to cooperate to do our best for all the children in the Borough.
Schools and the council need to work together. In the past the council has not always managed to achieve a good working relationship with all our schools. As the new lead councillor for Children’s Services I will be doing whatever I can to foster a true partnership between the council and schools, for the benefit of all our children.
Cllr Prue Bray is the executive member for children’s services on Wokingham Borough Council
