Thomas Aveling School Gets Planning Go-AheadThe Thomas Aveling School in Arethusa Road has for some time been working towards providing a number of improvements to the school that would also bring benefits to the wider community. One such benefit is the recently-opened library, a first class resource that is open to the public out of school hours.
The downside is that, in order to pay for all of this, the school needs to raise funds somehow. Although there are very limited grants available for certain purposes, there is nowhere near enough to fulfil the school's needs. Therefore they decided to sell off some unused sloping ground at the far end of their playing field with outline planning consent for housing, which would nmaximise the land's saleable value.
It is unfortunate that more and more schools up and down the country have felt compelled to take this kind of step, but that is the result of higher expectations of schools without the funding to go with those aspirations. With the direct funding of schools by central government (not in itself necessarily a bad thing) this has meant that we in Medway Council can do little to help our schools at such times of need.
In the event, the planning application the school submitted was a good enough proposal to be approved, after a site visit and strong public opposition from the road facing the site of the planning application. Because of the widespread approval by the public of what the school was doing, and appreciation of its need (in the present political climate in Britain) to take the path it has, this was one situation where neither approval nor refusal was going to please everyone.
On balance, it does appear that the decision was probably the right one, even though I personally hate the need to develop any green land. However, the story is not over yet...
The next stage is for the school to seek approval for selling the playing field land from the Department for Education and Science. The consent granted by Medway Council also needs approval from the Deputy Prime Minister's office as a departure from the adopted Medway Local Plan. Therefore the enabling decisions will be taken by central government, who are the ones who effectively put the school in their current predicament in the first place. Therefore it is only right that they should be the ones to take the overriding decisions on whether to allow the school to sell the land and on whether that area of green space should be allowed to be developed for housing.