There is some good news on local secondary school places as pupil allocations were announced last week by the County Council. After the debacle last year which left over 50 pupils from west Shoreham and especially Swiss Gardens Primary, faced with travelling to a Worthing School none of them had chosen, it looks all have been accommodated locally.
Shoreham Academy remains oversubscribed as usual with 300 places filled but Sir Robert Woodard has been able to offer 310 places this year because of the artificially large ‘bulge year’ which is about to leave. They have offered 298 leaving 12 spare places. Steyning Grammar School also has 44 spare spaces and St Andrews has expanded to 210 places with only 10 unallocated so far. The Head at St Andrews is to be commended on the way she has rapidly turned the school around which is now rated ‘Good’ by OFSTED.
Whilst the pressure is off this year there remains a longer term shortage of secondary school places for Adur pupils in Adur and the County Council still needs to address that. Further feasibility studies of expanding numbers, including at the Shoreham Academy Middle Road site, are due to report soon. I went to see the Schools Minister Damian Hinds on Monday to make sure the Department for Education continues to put pressure on West Sussex to get it right.
I have attended the Shoreham Beach Resident’s Association AGM in virtually every one of my 27 years in Parliament, but this year was different. There were still the complaints about the state of the loo block on Beach Green, speeding motorists and potholes but there was one voice missing… and that was the late Alderman Liza McKinney. Liza could always be relied on to come up quietly with the killer questions, invariably using courtesy as a lethal weapon, and invariably right.
She was rightly made one of Adur’s first honourary aldermen before her death last year and she is greatly missed though her lifetime’s dedication to Shoreham remains in plain sight. It was entirely fitting that Chair Joss Loader asked for a rousing round of applause rather than silence in her memory.
