Schools should ‘build upwards’ to meet demand, says Lord Nash

Speaking to TES, Lord Nash said the example in New York City where schools were housed in ‘skyscrapers’ was a good example of what could be done to accommodate extra demand.

Lord Nash said that ‘the idea of schools only being on one or two floors is not essential’ and that given the current need for additional school places ‘we are going to have to see schools going up’.

Lord Nash added: "We have to be careful they are put in appropriate places – it has just got to be done sensitively.”

His comments come after Dr Sarah Welch, the new chair of the Independent Schools Association, warned that rushing to create large ‘titan schools’ was a misguided plan to accommodate the increasing school age population.

Welch said that she failed to see how these larger schools could benefit individual children, and likened the move to the cheap high rise tower blocks built to cope with the post war boom.

Welch said: “Let me make an analogy: back in the 1950s and 1960s there was a population boom and we built lots of very tall tower blocks around the place and now we are knocking them down.

“I think there has to be a very thoughtful approach to anything to do with education. It’s not simply, ‘We’ve got more children coming through the system so therefore we make the schools bigger to accommodate them'.

“I think there’s a much larger debate there and a lot of future planning that needs to go ahead. We need to look beyond how we get through this rise in a primary school population by just slapping on extra classrooms. I do think it’s got to be thought through a lot better.

“[Titan schools] are misguided. I would question the reasons why it’s happening – why is it being done? I think this is financially driven, it’s to do with budgets and economies of scale but we are not talking about manufacturing industry, we are talking about education.”

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