Concerns raised over pressure on school places in Brighton and Hove

Education chiefs need to find space for an extra 1,500 secondary school pupils in Brighton and Hove by the end of the decade.

A report to councillors described this as the equivalent of a large secondary school.

The looming shortage prompted Labour and Conservative councillors to criticise the Green administration of Brighton and Hove City Council for not doing enough to tackle the issue.

The Greens said that the council had only found out in December how much it could spend on extra building work to squeeze in more students in existing schools in the area.

Councillor Sue Shanks, who leads on the issue for the Greens, said: “This is not a unique problem to Brighton and Hove.

“We have only just had the extra allocation of money from the government.”

Councillor Sue Shanks

She pointed to the closure of East Brighton College of Media and Arts (Comart) formerly known as Marina High and, for many years, Stanley Deason.

Comart, in Wilson Avenue, largely served Whitehawk. The troubled school closed in August 2005.

Councillor Shanks said that the Greens wanted to ask the government to give the council more freedom to build its own schools.

At the moment any new school has to be an academy or free school.

Speaking during a council meeting at Hove Town Hall on Thursday (27 March), she said: “I don’t think we’ve got a crisis at the moment.

“I want us to work together because this is dangerously becoming a political issue.”

She added that she just wanted children to have a local school to go to where they could get a good education.

Councillor Anne Pissaridou, for Labour, said: “We are on the brink of a major crisis.”

She said that the numbers in the Dorothy Stringer and Varndean catchment area this year highlighted the growing problem.

Councillor Pissaridou said that the council “may have been able to apply a sticking plaster but this problem is only going to get worse in the years ahead”.

And she added: “We will run out of places in the city by 2017.”

Toad’s Hole Valley offered one possible solution, she said, but there was no timescale.

She said: “The Green admin locally should grasp the nettle.”

Councillor Andrew Wealls, for the Conservatives, said: “It’s worth bearing in mind that the report does highlight the fact that we are still 140 reception places short in 2016-17.”

He criticised the Greens’ rejection of King’s House on Hove seafront as a potential school site. The building is the council’s headquarters but is to be sold.

Councillor Wealls also urged the Greens to rethink its opposition to academies and free schools.

He added: “Labour criticises the administration but comes up with no positive suggestions as to what we actually do about this problem.”

Councillor Alex Phillips, a Green member who works as a secondary school teacher, said: “I’m fundamentally opposed to academies because they are bad for teachers, bad for communities and especially bad for pupils.”

Former Labour leader Councillor Gill Mitchell said: “Our city will have just enough places until 2017 but only if all schools are full.”

She said that more pupils would end up being directed – or sent – to a school that they did not want to go to.

“Secondary heads are baulking at further expansion,” she said.

“And we are now talking about deferring this issue until after the election.

“This administration needs to show some grip. It needs to give some leadership … and to remove the uncertainty prevalent across the city among parents who do not know where their children will be educated in two or three years’ time.”