Concerns over city’s plan to spend £7.6m on extra school places
CONCERNS HAVE been voiced by councillors over the cost of providing extra school places in Leeds.
The city council has announced plans to spend more than £7m to increase places for a two-year “bulge cohort” of pupils at two schools.
It has emerged, however, that it would cost the council £2.8m less to create extra places permanently at another school in the city.
The leader of the council’s Conservative group, Coun Andrew Carter, accused the authority of financial profligacy, adding one trust was able to ask for money ‘beyond their wildest dreams’.
But senior councillors and officers claimed they had no choice but to spend extra money expanding places at existing schools, due to the Government’s continued delay of building a new school in the south of the city to alleviate demand.
Plans discussed at Leeds Council’s executive board showed the authority was looking to spend £7.6m on creating 120 extra secondary school places for two “bulge” cohort years, split between Leeds City Academy in the north, and Cockburn Academy in the south.
However, the report also showed that £6.8m of this money would be to fund the places at Cockburn School, despite taking on the same number of extra places as Leeds City Academy.
The same meeting also heard plans to create an extra 300 permanent places in Allerton Grange School would only cost the authority £4.8m.
Council officers claimed the extra costs were mainly due to difficulties in expanding the Cockburn site.
But Coun Carter called for the plans to be investigated by the council’s scrutiny committee, suggesting £7.6m was far too expensive for the number of extra places that would be available.
The Labour leader of the council, Coun Judith Blake, said: “It’s time for a broader discussion for education to be managed through local authorities. This issue has highlighted how damaging it has actually been to so many of us.”