Lambeth Education: History

How the Lambeth's Conservatives and Liberal Democrats let our kids down
After four years of Tory-Liberal rule, hundreds of local children were left without a place at any local secondary school. With the Government offering the Council millions of pounds to provide more places, it was a biting indictment of Tory-Liberal failure that they failed to get to grips with the problem. On secondary schools allocation day, the Lib Dems and Tories simply told hundreds of children they had no school to move on to. No wonder the councillor they put in charge of education lost his supposedly ‘safe’ seat in the council elections in May 2006.

Local parents were deeply frustrated by the Tories’ and Liberals’ refusal to make education a priority. When the Government first offered the money to build new schools, the Tory/Liberal councillors said they didn’t want it. Their excuse was that their councillors wouldn’t get to run the school themselves, so out of spite they tried to deny children the chance of a local education. When Labour councillors joined parents in a borough-wide campaign for local children, the Tories and Liberals were forced to cave in – but the site they offered for the school to be built on was an undersized strip of land alongside a railway track. They announced it wasn’t worth spending more money to build new schools, although they were happy to spend millions funding brand new office buildings for themselves.

Campaigners identified the Council’s waste depot site on Shakespeare Road as the site for a new school, but the ruling Tories and Liberals refused to do the work necessary to find anywhere else for the waste trucks to go. Instead, they spent years in an endless ‘review’ that was simply a stalling mechanism designed to get them safely through the council elections without taking a decision. It was this kind of dithering and refusal to take decisions that left Labour to inherit a situation in May 2006 where planning had not been agreed for any of the new schools the Government had offered to pay for.

Tory and Lib Dem let downs

• Failed to start work on two new schools the Government had offered to pay for
• Selfishly said they would refuse millions of pounds from the Government to build new schools if their councillors didn’t get to run them
• Left hundreds of children without a place in any local school year after year
• Drew up secret plans to close down a popular primary school in Clapham and rebuild it on the roof of another school
• Lost £1 million when they forgot to complete negotiations to buy land for the Government-funded Lambeth Academy

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