Kingston's planned new secondary school hangs in the balance

Headteachers have written to the Education Secretary saying that in terms of meeting demand for school places there is currently no need for the Kingsmeadow CofE school.

The long-running, and much delayed, plans for a new Church of England secondary school at Kingsmeadow, next to the football stadium and athletics track, look to be entering the make-or-break phase.

The Department for Education is currently reviewing the pipeline of all previously approved planned free schools, with 44 currently being put under the microscope, including the Southwark Diocese-led plan as well as a Surbiton Primary School and a secondary school in Richmond.

According to Kingston Council education officials a timescale for a decision is “loosely around February, Spring time”. The Department for Education are expected to say ‘yes’ to some, ‘no’ to others and some will be put on hold to be revisited with a look at birthrates in the next couple of years “but there’s not a lot of detail coming out yet”.

If it is decided purely on school place demand, then it seems unlikely to get the go ahead at the moment given the plummeting school rolls in the borough’s primary schools which will begin hitting the borough’s Year 7s from September. (See below for more on the falling numbers of pupils in Kingston schools)

A different justification for the school is to provide more Church of England school places within the borough, though it is not clear whether that is going to be one of the criteria taken into account when the Department for Education makes their choice.

A bit of history

This planned school has been around since the days of surging birthrates and rising school rolls in the early 2010s although it wasn’t until 2019 that Kingston finalised an agreement to lease the land on the Kingsmeadow site for 125 years on a peppercorn rent basis to create a six-form entry (900 pupil) school for 11-16 year olds, subject to planning permission. The voluntary-aided Church of England school was set to open in September 2025, and the plans include a 20-place specialist resource provision for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Kingston Council said: “The new, non-academically-selective school will meet the growing need for more high-quality state-funded secondary school places in the local area and provide reassurance and certainty for Kingston's parents and carers that there will be sufficient places for their children.”

The process of getting planning permission has not been a smooth one - one tricky element has been what to do about slow worms at the site. The application was submitted in November 2023 and the applicants have been responding to objections/concerns regularly, carrying out new studies and submitting more documents - there are more than 100 now available to read on the council website. The scheme has not gone to the council’s planning committee yet for a decision, so, assuming the 2019 press notice was accurate, the land has yet to be leased for the school.

Some pics of what is planned

(All pictures courtesy of planning application documents)

Here’s the official website setting out more details of the planned school.

And here’s what the project team say about the plans:

What about school place demand in Kingston?

For a long time Kingston Council seemed to believe that the borough was somehow unique on school place planning and would not face the falling primary school pupil numbers the rest of London faced. As was pointed out a couple of years back on what was then Twitter… you can scroll through the entire thread here.

It has now been accepted that there is not going to be a 15% increase in reception pupils between 2022 and 2027, although the Kingston forecast is still for steady numbers rather than a fall (despite the evidence of primary schools not only closing their ‘bulge’ classes, but some also reducing their ‘normal’ number of forms). So far the numbers are down by more than that 15%. At one council meeting a year or two back the then officer explained that he’d rather be optimistic in his projections to ensure that the new school got the go-ahead. The reason being that even if it is not needed in terms of demand for places now, it is likely to be needed at some time in the future. And if there’s not a school built on the Kingsmeadow site, that site is likely to be developed and that means in the future, when there is a real need for a school, there won’t be an available site.

The experience he pointed to was schools on Richmond Road in North Kingston, where one was opened to meet demand in the 1980s, closed when demand fell after a few years, only for a new school - The Kingston Academy - to be needed and built a couple of decades later as pupil numbers rose again. It’s unlikely that central government will be basing their decisions on such long-term thinking.

There’s little doubt that the school would have been justified by the demand for secondary school places in Kingston over the past five years, but the task of getting the newish government’s approval on the basis of school place need is clearly made harder by the decline in pupil numbers currently in primary schools.

And finally…

If the Department for Education decide to say no to the school plan what will happen to the site? Could it yet be that Kingstonian FC end their years-long search for a new ground about 100 yards from where they started…