Threatened grammar could opt out

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A grammar school facing closure could stay open by opting out of council control and adopting trust status.

The head teacher of St Joseph's College in Stoke, Roisin Maguire, says it has begun talks with two other local schools about setting up a trust.

So far no grammar school has closed since Labour entered office.

The distancing of David Cameron's Conservatives from grammars has added to the political sensitivity surrounding selective schools.

In the current dispute, a local Labour MP is backing campaigners wanting to keep the grammar school open - while the plans to close it are from a private company, operating as the city's provider of children's services.

'Flawed'

Schools in Stoke are facing a major reorganisation in an attempt to raise standards - including proposals to close all the secondary schools in the city and to re-open a new set of schools - with five fewer schools.

Parents and staff at St Joseph's College, a selective Catholic school, with by far the best exam results in the city, are complaining that this will see their school closed and the loss of its high standards.

National attention has been focused on this case - as it would become the first grammar school to close for two decades.

It would also mean shutting down a school that achieves 89% five good GCSEs including English and maths, when 16 other schools in the city score between 14% and 53%.

Local Labour MP, Robert Flello, says the re-organisation plans and the threat to close St Joseph's and other schools in the city are "fundamentally flawed" and "ridiculous".

As well as planning a judicial appeal, head teacher Roisin Maguire says that St Joseph's is in talks with two local schools about creating a trust federation.

The concept of "trust" status was created by the last education legislation of the Blair era - and it allows schools to create their own clusters, separate from local authority control.

'Year Zero'

Trusts "employ their own staff, set their own admission arrangements, and manage their own land and assets" - and could allow St Joseph's to remove itself from the closure plans.

The proposals for the re-organisation of schools have been put forward by Serco, the private company which runs children's services in Stoke.

And Ms Maguire believes that the prospect of losing her school from the city's education statistics will concentrate the minds of Serco.

MP Robert Flello says that he hopes the plans will be scrapped and replaced with a different set of proposals - so that schools will not have to make decisions about whether to adopt trust status.

"This year zero approach is fundamentally flawed, it's too simplistic, it doesn't work in education. The potential for damaging children's education is frightening," says Mr Flello.

St Joseph's is a selective school, but entrance is not based on a straightforward 11-plus system. Instead it has a test which requires pupils to have reached level four (the expected level for 11 year olds) in three subjects.

After this cut-off point, it gives preference to Catholic pupils, with a proportion of places also allocated for non-Catholics.

At present, St Joseph's works collaboratively with its neighbouring school, says Mr Flello - and he says it is a model of the "collegiate" approach that should be introduced.

A spokesperson for Stoke council says that if the proposals are adopted, they will still have to be submitted to the government for approval.

"Never before has one city had the chance to remake its secondary education system all at once like this. We must not let it slip," says the city's elected mayor, Mark Meredith.