Decision to go ahead with school closures consultation branded 'farce'

The six-week consultation will be launching as originally planned on Monday despite committee demanding the council reconsider, reports James Cracknell

Suffolks Primary School parents (inset left) with council leader Alessandro Georgiou (top right) and Labour councillor Ian Barnes (bottom right)

Parents and Labour politicians – including a local MP – have reacted with fury to news that a council consultation on three proposed school closures is still going ahead this month.

Enfield Council’s minority Conservative administration took just 24 hours to reconfirm the decision after a cross-party scrutiny committee demanded a rethink of the plans on Tuesday (3rd).

A public consultation on the proposed closure of Bishop Stopford’s School, Suffolks Primary School and Starks Field Primary School – which also includes alternative options to closure – will now be launching on Monday (9th).

In response Labour councillor Ian Barnes, who led a ‘call-in’ request at Tuesday’s overview and scrutiny committee, wrote a letter to council leader Alessandro Georgiou saying he and his party colleagues were “astonished” at the speed of the decision to go ahead with the consultation and that “no corrected report” was included in the cabinet agenda on Wednesday (4th).

While a six-page report was hastily added to the agenda, it did not itself include corrected data. Instead, it instructed officers to “validate, clarify and, where necessary, update the data contained within the [original] cabinet report, taking account of any possible inaccuracies raised” as well as “ensure that the consultation documents reflect any resulting corrections or clarifications”.

Cllr Georgiou has already responded to Cllr Barnes to insist that correct procedures have been followed and that the consultation will be “thorough” and “genuinely” seek “views and ideas of staff, parents and the wider community”.

Tuesday’s scrutiny debate – as well as discussing the proposed school closures and what might be done to support affected pupils – centred around claims of “inaccuracies” in the original council report published last month.

The council’s director of education Peter Nathan appeared to acknowledge some of the points raised and that the data used was likely to now be out of date. But councillors on the committee made clear they wanted any “errors” to be fixed ahead of the consultation being launched.

In a separate letter to the council’s monitoring officer sent today (Friday 6th), Enfield North MP Feryal Clark threatened to seek legal advice about a potential judicial review of the decision to launch the consultation, should she not receive a “substantive response” to a list of five questions by 5pm on Monday.

Clark’s questions include whether the council is confident this week’s decision-making process was “legally and constitutionally compliant”.

In his own letter to the council leader, Cllr Barnes wrote: “The report underpinning the original decision on 14th October contained numerous errors, yet cabinet reconsidered the matter on 4th November without a corrected report addressing those errors. How could cabinet members properly assess the decision without an accurate and complete evidence base?”

Cllr Georgiou later responded in his own letter. He said: “Overview and scrutiny referred the decision back to cabinet and this was done at the first opportunity [the next day]. Officers worked tirelessly to incorporate feedback from the committee, and a revised report was presented, debated and passed the following evening.

“To delay the important discussion around the future of these schools in the same way as the previous administration would be a complete dereliction of our duty to Enfield residents.

“Officers have been clear at every meeting where this decision has been discussed in relation to claimed inaccuracies in the data. The information contained within the reports relates to school rolls at a specific point in time and are subject to change as pupils join and leave schools throughout the year.”

He added that the council would now “work with the schools concerned to obtain the most up to date roll information and will commence a thorough consultation that genuinely seeks the views and ideas of staff, parents and the wider community before my administration takes a position on a way forward”.

Cllr Georgiou has also vowed to meet leaders from all three schools and also hold a public meeting for residents.

In an email seen by the Dispatch, Katherine Gorman, whose son Max attends Suffolks, said that she and other parents met Cllr Georgiou on Wednesday afternoon but were not told the council’s cabinet would be reconsidering the decision to proceed with the consultation just a few hours later.

“This omission has only added to concerns about openness and has further undermined trust in the process,” said Katherine.

In a press release Abdul Abdullahi, the Labour group’s shadow cabinet member for education, added: “Quite simply, this is a farce.”

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