PRIMARY SCHOOL ..ON TOP OF LIDL
CHILDREN at one of the Government’s flagship free schools are set for lessons above a Lidl supermarket.
It is one of 37 open for three or more years but still in temporary premises.
They include Deer Pa r k School in Twickenham, S o u t h We s t London, which is earmarked to move above the store.
Since it was set up in 2015 it has been housed at an adult community college.
School leaders have blasted the Government’s f r ee s c hools policy, branding it a “mess” while the Liberal Democrats said children were being “let down”.
Meanwhile Paxton Academy in South London has been dubbed “Portakabin Academy” after f i ve years in mobile classrooms on a rugby field. The International Academy of Greenwich has had plans to build its permanent premises blocked after a poor Ofsted review.
It has been housed in an old office block since opening in 2016. Kingston Community School in South West London has been housed at a former NHS clinic since 2015.
And Earl’s Court Free Primary, London, part of the Knowledge Schools Trust set up by free schools tsar Toby Young in 2014, is yet to start work on its permanent base. It is one of 11 opened that year still with no fixed home.
The National Education Union slammed the free schools policy.
Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary, said: “The blame for these failures should be laid at the Government’s feet for having pursued an incoherent mess of a policy with dogmatic zeal.
“The free schools programme doesn’t just need reform, it needs scrapping.”
Lib Dem Education spokeswoman Layla Moran said: “Schools are being built in the wrong places, at the wrong times, at vast expense to the taxpayer.” But the Department for Education said: “Of free schools inspected by Ofsted in temporary accommodation for more than two years, around nine in ten rated good or outstanding.”