Issue details

School Organisation Team consulted with internal officers from Highways, Connectivity and Home to School Transport. Highways will ensure that ModeShift Stars is commissioned as an incentive for children to use sustainable transport when travelling to and from school and a traffic assessment was completed as part of the Planning application.

As Madeley High School is an academy and responsible for their own consultation for the expansion proposal, which ran from 7 November 2022 to 16 December 2022.

A public consultation event attended by one person was held at the Madeley Centre on Wednesday 23rd November 2022. The school had the proposals pinned on walls in order that more people could see the plans.

The consultation yielded 6 responses, 5 (83%) of which were in favour. The response not in favour was received from the CEO of a local trust which has three high schools located across Newcastle, all of which are undersubscribed with two rated “Requires Improvement” by Ofsted. They felt that expanding Madeley High would compound this issue. The trust also queried why Madeley exceeded PAN for the academic year 2022. SCC’s school admissions team have advised the reason for the exceeding of PAN was to accommodate as many first preferences as possible. It should also be noted that Madeley High School was the only high school considered as all the developments fall within Madeley High catchment area and their feeder schools.
The enlargement and the increase of PAN from 135 to 150 from September 2024 is required to mitigate the impact of up to 1,000 new homes within the catchment of the school. This supports SCC’s commitment to providing places for local children and the local authority’s responsibility for ensuring there are sufficient school places within a reasonable distance. The school would not be able to accommodate the additional pupils expected in future years without the proposed expansion.
The Local Authority did not consider any other schools as they would have been out of catchment, out of the Madeley High School’s admissions criteria and the sites are geographically a greater distance away than Madeley High School.
S77 consent was given by the DfE in December 2022. Planning Submission is in progress. Approval of the delegated decision is requested in lieu of the pending planning approval which would be necessary before the academy trust can submit their expansion proposal for the approval of the Office of the Regional Director. Funding would not be released without these approvals in place.