School consults over changing to academy status

SLOUGH: Khalsa Primary School has launched a public consultation on whether the school should convert to academy status.

The school in Wexham Lane, said an academy conversion would help it ‘build on its successes in recent years’.

In January the school was rated outstanding by Ofsted and is currently oversubscribed ‘with a large waiting list of prospective pupils’.

The school said if it converts to an academy trust it will be able to ‘maximise expertise’ and use resources more ‘efficiently and effectively’. The school also said it would get increased funding from the Department of Education and the ability to broaden the curriculum.

The academy would be run by a newly established trust, called the Sikh Academies Trust, with some members of the existing governing body. The academy would have a board of trustees and those individuals would also be the directors.

However there would be some additional finance requirements, such as making several returns to the Education and Skills Funding Agency which would be an ‘additional administrative task’ for the team.

A statement on its website said: “Becoming an academy gives our senior leadership team more autonomy around the structure and content of the curriculum that is taught at Khalsa Primary School. This will allow the school to provide a broad and balanced education based on the best interest of our pupils, while still covering the curriculum needed for our pupils to successfully sit national exams.

“Working with other schools may enable us to offer the opportunity to expand our curriculum and/or our extended schools prog ramme.”

A virtual public consultation meeting will take place on Thursday, October 22, at 6pm.

www.khalsaprimaryschool.com/consultation/