BIG PICTURE
The two postcodes do cover Macclesfield but they also encompass a very wide area outside the town.
The area in question stretches from Adlington to the north, Lower Withington to the west, the ‘Cat and Fiddle’ inn to the east and even takes in Rushton Spencer, Staffordshire, to the south.
It would be far more pertinent to know what percentage of pupils actually live in the town of Macclesfield and how many live in the rest of the SK10 and SK11 postcodes.
This leaves the remaining 50 per cent of pupils who live outside these two postcode areas in such places as south Manchester to the north, Knutsford to the west, Stoke on Trent to the south and Buxton to the east.
As the new school will not be in a central location, it will mean that virtually all of the (approx) 1,500 pupils and staff will have to travel by either car or coach.
This would put intolerable pressure on the existing inadequate road system in the vicinity of the proposed school. M H Clark Macclesfield
MORE AGAINST THAN FOR PLAN
I HAVE been following the responses on the CEC website to the planning application by King’s School for the development of their Fence Avenue site (of which 50 per cent is undeveloped pasture land recently bought but not used by the school).
There are responses from just over 300 different addresses. Of these 31pc support the proposals and 69pc object.
Most objections identified planning reasons for the development of the whole site to be refused.
Of those in support, 45 are identifiable as from employees, governors, trustees and parents of the school. However there are also a number of objections from parents.
The school has written to all the parents asking for their support.
Of those only five are from addresses in the area of east of Macclesfield where the site is, 28 from addresses in Macclesfield, another 25 from addresses in postcodes SK10 and SK11 but not in Macclesfield and 37 from even further afield.
Of the green belt sites chosen for development in the Town Strategy consultation of the Local Plan in 2012, this site had by far the most responses with 28pc support, 72pc against.
Objections far outweighed support in the subsequent consultations.
CEC promote active consultation with residents but are they being listened to? Most are not against development but concerned that it should be in the right place. Had the application been for development of the school and playing fields only, I suspect that this would have been a very different story. Pam Upchurch Macclesfield