School's £150k bill for extra pupils

A school has made a loss of almost £150,000 due to pupils transferring from a doomed secondary nearby - with its headteacher criticising Walsall Council for its handling of the closure.

Brownhills School is taking in 94 mid-year admissions from soon-to-shut Sneyd School in Bloxwich, 81 of which have not been funded — leaving a loss to the school of £144,901.83.

In a letter from Brownhills head teacher Helen Keenan to Walsall Council's Schools Forum which will meet on March 1, she has asked the council for more funding, adding that the emotional and social impact on the pupils has been "underestimated".

Sneyd will close at the end of the summer term this year, but many parents have chosen to move their children on to another school earlier so they are not uprooted during GCSE courses.

Mrs Keenan said that delays in informing parents of the financial support available for transferring students led to many to be "in limbo and very worried about their child's future education".

Funding for pupils at Sneyd went to the school which, due to the mid-year transfers, is no longer giving many of them an education. In Mrs Keenan's submission to the forum, she said:

"Brownhills School is the largest receiving school for Sneyd pupils in Walsall by a significant margin.

"We have put in place additional measures to support the transferring of pupils and feel that the emotional and social impact on the pupils of such a tight knit community-based school closing was underestimated. Similarly the school has supported many of the families emotionally during this time. We have done this because it is the right thing to do."

She added: "We will continue to provide a good education and additional support for all of the transferring Sneyd pupils and their families, whatever the decision of the School Forum on this matter."

Officers at the council have recommended that the Schools Forum agree a mechanism to be put in place to allow funding for the children to follow them to their respective Walsall schools when it meets on March 1.

The former Sneyd site will reopen in September as the Black Country University Technical College, the first in the country of a new breed of schools offering students a chance of science and engineering qualifications with the national curriculum.

Firms from the West Midlands are signing up to help give students more vocational training so they can get jobs in industry.