Councillor Victoria Mills, cabinet member for children and schools, to introduce.
Minutes:
Councillor Victoria Mills, cabinet member for children and schools, addressed the meeting saying that educational achievement in Southwark had risen steadily and that results were now above the national average. 93% of Southwark schools were rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. The council was working in partnership and had a good collaborative relationship with, all schools, including academies. In terms of the 2016 GCSE results, Southwark was provisionally ranked 23rd in the country.
The council had overcome the shortfall in primary school places which the Dulwich area had experienced in 2008 by investing in existing popular, oversubscribed and outstanding schools, especially after the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme had ended in 2010. The council was not allowed to open new schools, and so was working with potential academy and free school providers to broker new sites. These included the Belham School and the new secondary school on the Dulwich hospital site, for example. The council’s building and investment programme was about £180 million. The money, for this had come from the Department for Education, the free school programme and from council funds.
Councillor Mills welcomed the government’s decision not to force all schools to become academies, but flagged up that government had consulted on proposals to make changes to the national funding formula, which risked Southwark schools losing between eight and 20 percent of their budgets.