Portslade school to learn if £12m extension can go ahead

One of the nine secondary schools in Brighton and Hove will learn today whether it can build a sixth form centre and science block fit for the 21st century.

The Portslade Aldridge Community Academy wants to spend £12 million on an extension at its Chalky Road site and a refurbishment and remodelling of the rest of the school.

The planning application is expected to be approved although the Green administration which runs Brighton and Hove City Council has its reservations about the very idea of academy schools.

Stuart McLaughlin is the principal at Portslade – or PACA – and said that the academy has a vision but is constrained by its buildings.

Those buildings include a 1920s block with long corridors and a disused quad on the Chalky Road site and a separate sixth form centre about a mile away on the corner of High Street and Mile Oak Road.

He wants to bring all his students together on one site. And he wants that site to contain a school fit for the future.

Unsurprisingly, technology will be a key part of the refit. Mr McLaughlin, 51, wants pupils to be able to use wireless technology anywhere in the school.

He wants bright, open spaces – easier for staff to monitor – and a physical heart to the school. To this end, a hub will be created by the students’ entrance which will be separate to the entrance for adults.

And he wants distinct areas for “schools within the school”.

Since taking over two years ago, Mr McLaughlin has created four houses – Delta, Dragon, Lunar and Victory.

The house system is used to foster team spirit and co-operation as well as an element of competition – and they break the school up into more manageable units. These are the schools within the school.

Each house has a specialism – enterprise, science and sport, creativity, and culture and communication. Each has its own teaching staff and management. And each has its own colours.

The pupils’ ties are the most commonly visible sign of those colours. And those pupils wear a jacket and tie to school.

Many of the changes at Portslade have echoes with the way that fee-paying schools operate. And this is deliberate. There is an ambition for his pupils which extends beyond the usual quest for good exam results. Although he wants those too.

Mr McLaughlin said that the school had a set of core values devised by the pupils and pinned up all round the school as a reminder. Those values are achievement, teamwork, respect, responsibility and perserverance.

Each has a few lines of explanation and the final heading, perserverance, includes a reference to a word that you don’t often hear in schools these days – failure.

Mr McLaughlin said that he and some of his staff would have preferred a different word. But the children insisted that they wanted it to be absolutely clear.

The academy’s sponsor, Sir Rod Aldridge, has also talked about failure in the past. He has cited his failure to pass the 11-plus as a spur to his later success as he tried to prove himself.

Mr McLaughlin is also an example of someone who has perservered and overcome adversity.

He was the head of Falmer High when the Aldridge Foundation took over. But he was passed over for the job of principal at the reborn school – now the Brighton Aldridge Community Academy.

The former PE and history teacher didn’t take long to find a new job running Portslade Community College. When the school was in line to become an academy and the Aldridge Foundation was announced as the sponsor, some people wondered whether Mr McLaughlin would survive.

He said: “I was disappointed I didn’t get the principal’s job at Falmer but I think it was the right decision. In order to get the transformation that was required, you need to get a change in the thinking at the top.”

However painful the decision must have been at the time, both schools can boast vastly improved exam results since the changes were made.

Last summer 72 per cent of Portslade pupils achieved five or more GCSEs with grades of A* to C compared with 38 per cent when Mr McLaughlin joined. The percentage whose five or more A* to C grades included maths and English was 41 per cent, up from 25 per cent when he joined.

Shortly after Mr McLaughlin’s arrival the school was placed in “special measures” by Ofsted, the official watchdog. But inspectors are now seeing a school which is measurably improving.

He said: “As an Aldridge academy, we’re about more than exam results. We will give our students the skills to be successful in life such as entrepreneurship and resilience.”

Having said that, the planning decision at Hove Town Hall this afternoon will make a difference to the pursuit of better exam results and academic excellence.

The proposed extension will house a new science centre with dedicated labs for the separate sciences – physics, chemistry and biology.

He hopes that work will start at Easter and be finished by September next year.

It will be interesting to see who opens the new building. After all, the sports centre – shared by the school and community – was officially opened in 1973 by Margaret Thatcher. She was Education Secretary at the time and was greeted by chants of “Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher!” for ending free school milk.

But even with the changes that have already been made, Mr McLaughlin is confident of progress. He expects his current Year 9 students to achieve the school’s best results yet.

He became a PE teacher in the era when Brian Glover’s brutal depiction in Kes rang alarmingly true. He said that the teaching profession had changed enormously since he started his career.

He is determined that his children – not just his two daughters but all those in his care – have the academic qualifications and the life skills needed to stand a better chance when they leave.

While the building plans are important, it is clear that they are just part of a much bigger picture.

Education Secretary Michael Gove waded into the debate about academy schools last week with all his rhetorical guns blazing.

The Conservative schools chief has taken on a policy promoted by former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and pushed it further and faster.

But the concept of academy schools is not without its opponents – and Mr Gove accused those opponents of being enemies of promise.

In Brighton and Hove the council’s cabinet member for children and young people, Sue Shanks, a Green councillor, has spoken passionately about the effects of creating academies.

She said at one council meeting recently: “We are opposed to the privatisation of education which was started under the last Labour government.”

She responded to Conservative suggestions that academies were freed from the control of councils and their bureaucracy by saying: “We don’t have control of our schools as a local authority. All the bureaucracy comes from central government.

“One local head teacher said recently that freedom from local authority control meant freedom from local authority support. At this time we are going to stick to our principles which are against academies.”

She also opposed the creation of “free schools”. At least two free schools have been proposed for Brighton and Hove.

She was criticised by the council’s opposition Labour group leader Gill Mitchell.

Councillor Mitchell said that the Green Party should take the money being made available by the government for academies and free schools.

She accused the Greens of putting their political principles before the good of the children of Brighton and Hove.

The debate locally has become particularly heated because there is a shortage of primary school places, especially in Portslade and central Hove.

Parents have until next Monday (16 January) to choose an infant, junior or primary school for next September.

But opposition councillors say that parents are having to make a choice without all the information that they need. They said that a final decision had still to be made about how many places would be available in each school.

Given the renewed push by Mr Gove to turn more schools into academies, it is only a matter of time before the there is a furore locally once more.

The arguments have echoes of the battles between supporters of grammar schools and comprehensives. But with primary schools also in the frame for change, this may well be a debate that rages deeper and wider.

One man whose view is settled is Sir Rod Aldridge. He went to secondary school in Portslade after failing his 11-plus and missing out on a place at Hove Grammar School. On leaving school he went to work in the post room at East Sussex County Council.

In September he returned to Portslade as the main sponsor when his old school reopened as the latest academy in Brighton and Hove. And just over a week ago he was knighted by the Queen in the New Year’s Honours List for services to young people.

In between, Sir Rod built a business and became a multimillionaire. When he retired he endowed the charitable Aldridge Foundation and started sponsoring academies, including the Brighton Aldridge Community Academy in Falmer.

Sir Rod, 64, said: “I’m overwhelmed and deeply honoured. It’s fantastic news. It’s for services to young people and that’s what it’s about. It’s fantastic for the foundation and for the team I’ve got around me.”

He hasn’t been given a date to go to Buckingham Palace yet where he will be dubbed by the Queen but he shouldn’t have far to go. His office is just round the corner – close to Victoria Station.

And he’s had a dress rehearsal of sorts, having been made an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 1994. Two years later he was given the freedom of the City of London and elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

How did the man who went to Portslade County School for Boys and went on to make his fortune end up coming back as the sponsor of two academies in Brighton and Hove?

The answer lies in an approach by the council when it wanted a sponsor for the old Falmer High School. Sir Rod agreed and the Brighton Aldridge Community Academy opened in 2010 before moving into a new £28 million building in September last year.

Sir Rod sponsors three academies in other parts of the country, is a patron and former trustee of the Prince’s Trust, chairmam of V, the volunteering charity, and a member of the Prince’s Charities Council.

He describes himself as “deeply committed to entrepreneurship and passionate in his commitment to equality of opportunity and access for all”.

He has now returned to his old school, which had become Portslade Community College, and turned it into the Portslade Aldridge Community Academy.

The proposed £12 million extension and refurbishment signals the start of an ambitious era for a school that had been officially classed as failing.