Press release

The Save Colvestone Campaign is deeply saddened that Hackney’s Labour Council is forcing through proposals to close Colvestone Primary School despite overwhelming resident opposition and opposition from all of the other parties represented in Hackney Council. The decision made by the Labour Mayor and Labour Cabinet will close a successful local authority school that has been at the heart of the Dalston community for over 162 years.

Despite challenging the Council’s proposals at every stage of the long and arduous consultation process, and warning of the Council’s persistent failure to follow its legal obligations for a statutory consultation, the Cabinet decision made in December and the ratification of that decision by the Scrutiny Panel (made up entirely of Labour councillors) in January left the Campaign with only the possibility of Judicial Review as a way to challenge the proposals.

Delays from the Council in organising the Scrutiny hearing, responding to the Pre-Action Protocol Letter and from the Legal Aid Agency in considering our application for funding meant that the Campaign was timed-out of challenging the consultation process and decision at Judicial Review. (It should be noted that all attempts to challenge Council consultations during the consultation process have been dismissed as pre-emptive, and so legal proceedings can only be brought at the end of the Council consultation process – by which time considerable damage has been done to schools in frame.)

There is no democratic scrutiny or process if a consultation is self-fulfilling. The worrying precedent set here, given that the issue of falling pupil numbers is projected to be a London-wide issue for the next 4-5 years (by which time they are predicted to begin rising), is that Councils can evade challenge and scrutiny of decisions to close local authority schools – provision that they are unable to reinstate given national policy that all new schools are automatically free schools, run by private companies and operating outside of local authority control and oversight.

Detailed Campaign analysis revealed a lack of non-denominational local authority school places in the south west of Hackney as a consequence of these proposals (where the majority of available places are in faith schools, treated the same as non-denominational schools by the local authority, in a borough that has voted overwhelmingly for non-denominational education provision). However, Hackney Education continues to insist that place availability ‘in the system’ equates to viable local school places for its residents. This over-cutting of provision seems designed to exacerbate flight of families from a borough that is becoming increasingly unaffordable, whilst refusing to account for necessary education provision for residents in new social housing already committed to by the Council.

The removal of local provision looks likely to compound a death-spiral of flight of families from the borough, driven by rising rents and a lack of genuinely affordable housing, potentially to be further exacerbated by current proposed cuts to Children’s Centres (i.e. affordable pre-school childcare) and future proposals to further cut primary school provision in the borough later this year. In a time of extreme strain in Council budgets, it is noted by the Campaign that families are likely to draw on a greater number of Council services compared to single, young professionals – the growth demographic in the borough and driver of inflated property prices and rent: the current proposals look likely to further underpin this vicious circle and make the borough increasingly unfeasible for current and future families to remain in the borough).

The Save Colvestone Campaign is gravely worried what the Council’s resistance to engaging with its residents will mean for planned future proposals to close further schools in 2024/25 and how that process will be run. During this consultation the Council have:

• refused to account for and respond to evidence and expert testimony that challenges their proposals; failed to provide evidence and supporting analysis that apparently justifies the proposals;

• failed to prepare mitigations for many of the most vulnerable in its community for harm caused by the process and decisions apparently made prior to the public consultation;

• and rejected the results of the public consultation that was overwhelmingly against the closure of Colvestone Primary School.

In addition, the consultation has been flawed from the outset, a result of the Council’s poor preparation and misleading statements made to school communities regarding ‘mergers’ and ‘amalgamations’, statements that failed to acknowledge or understand the limitations of ‘free school presumption’: as the Council’s own documents and meeting minutes show, parents and staff were told during the public consultation that schools could be merged when they cannot, as hiring a mix of staff from two schools would require the foundation of a new school, something a local authority cannot do.

From the outset of the consultation process the Save Colvestone Campaign has warned that the structure of the consultation and the failure to include any alternative options for consideration would mortally damage each of the schools in frame. Each stage of the consultation was timed to coincide either with parental visits, Reception year applications or the Reception place acceptance deadline – uncertainty and reputational damage that severely affected both current pupil numbers and future intakes of each school in frame.

By providing no alternatives to the proposals in the consultation, itself a failure to meet the criteria for a legal consultation that must be conducted at a ‘formative stage’, and by failing to allow constituents to make an informed decision through failure to answer direct questions and denying access to relevant materials and data, the Council failed in its legal obligations to allow residents to engage in the consultation or influence its outcomes. No guidance was given to residents as to what information was being sought by the Council during the consultation or how different factors might influence its decision-making process: indeed the Council’s own Quality Impact Assessment produced at the end of the consultation fails to include a single example of how the consultation informed the decision-making process, despite hundreds of depositions.

We find it astonishing that, having presented Hackney residents with a ‘yes/no’ choice, and the hundreds of respondents to both stages of the consultation being overwhelmingly against the proposals, the Council is proceeding regardless. It is noted with bitter irony that Hackney Labour, a Council that claims to ‘listen to its residents’, is proceeding to close Colvestone Primary School when consultation responses were 95% against this course of action.

Throughout this process parents, families and staff have been discouraged from engaging with a consultation that will result in a major reconfiguration of primary school provision in Hackney: the unprecedented move to close four local authority primary schools represents over 10% of the total in the borough. The Save Colvestone Campaign itself encountered persistent delays and false representations from the Council. The Campaign is still waiting for requests for information made over 6 months ago, for example. This failure to produce evidence apparently underpinning the proposals and to release evidence relevant to the decisions being consulted on gravely undermined any semblance of democratic process. This failure of transparency extended to Cabinet meetings and the Council’s own Scrutiny Committee where elected officials consistently failed to engage with the substance of almost every question we have asked during this process.

Despite persistent claims from elected officials throughout that ‘no decision has been made’, subsequent to the final Cabinet decision Hackney Education admitted that officials had decided prior to the public consultations not to place pupils in the four schools being proposed for closure, a deliberate suppression of pupils numbers (exacerbated by advice given to parents during the consultation process by the Council’s Schools Admissions Team that the schools would be closing) and in contravention of the Council’s own Admissions rules (specifically that which allocates non-preference places to the closest local school). Reflecting a pattern of behaviour by the Council and its officials, this admission was received only after challenging two previous erroneous and misleading responses to the FOI request – a process that took many months.

It is noted that, despite the public phase of this consultation beginning in March 2023 and despite repeated requests, the elected officials of Hackney’s Labour Council and the publicly-paid civil servants of Hackney Education have:

• failed to publish either a basic or detailed cost-benefit analysis of the (highly expensive) decision to close Colvestone Primary School

• failed to account for the predicted influx of primary school aged children as a consequence of the Dalston Plan housing developments (modelled using current GLA housing yield tools), for which Colvestone would be the nearest primary school provision for all of the major sites - an influx not accounted for in the GLA data the Council uses to model general population trends, and on which the proposals are based

• failed to disclose the details of covenants on the historic deeds of Colvestone’s Grade II listed buildings that likely restrict future use

• failed to disclose conversations held with interested parties regarding the future use of the school buildings and site, both before and during the consultation process

• failed to account for the school’s place at the heart of a fully-funded re-greening scheme and pioneering permanent play street (the borough’s first ‘21st Century Street’) or for the recommendations proposing that pupils move to a school with 33% higher levels of pollution on a busy main road

• failed to account for schools that have limited their own size (PAN) for financial stability, even in cases where the proposals will likely force a school to expand without sufficient pupils (whilst offering no protection for that school from the selection criteria that govern which schools are selected for the next wave of proposed closures)

• failed to account for how damaging the consultation process has been for schools in frame, despite the fact that increasing pupil numbers is one metric that schools can conceivably alter to make themselves more financially viable

• failed to account for the effect on financial viability of the school of a raft of independently-identified cost savings in a report co-produced for the Council and signed off on by the Council itself, suggesting future viability, as recently as Spring 2023 (when the consultation was made public)

• failed to account for requests to expand the school’s excellent existing Special Educational Needs (SEN) provision at the same time that the Council is attempting to rapidly increase SEN provision in the borough to reduce the millions of pounds the borough spends on outsourced provision

• failed to establish a functional process for the place identification and transfer of pupils with SEN and those with EHCPs from schools now facing closure - of which the school has a high proportion and who represent some of the most vulnerable in the local authority system

• failed to address why inquiries from a school to co-locate to a school in frame received early in the consultation (with the explicit aim of enabling a school’s survival) were not pursued promptly, or why no other creative solutions that were suggested to protect schools were investigated or pursued, and

• given that one of the fundamental issues driving school closures, and the rise of English  class sizes to the largest in Europe by some way (almost 30 compared to low 20s and below in almost all other European nations), is the stagnation of per-pupil funding, the Labour Council and Mayor have failed to commit to pressing its parliamentary party to commit to raising per-pupil premium should they be elected in the forthcoming national elections.

The Save Colvestone Campaign is currently working on making all of the information gathered during the campaign and the legal advice it received public on the newly-established Hackney Families website to help other residents in Hackney and beyond facing similar threats to provision. This information and guidance will be published shortly, and we recommend that Hackney residents concerned by threats to education and childcare provision in the borough to register there for updates.

For press enquiries please contact:

colvestonesos@gmail.com