Several local schools have launched community consultations about forming a shared “cooperative education trust”, and changing from community schools to foundations, perhaps from September 2019.
Article continues after this message...
A foundation school is “a state-funded school in which the governing body has greater freedom in the running of the school than in community schools,” says Wikipedia.
According to school websites (eg here, here and here), governing bodies of Bitterne Manor Primary School, Bitterne Park School, Moorlands Primary School, Redbridge Community School, St Denys Primary School, Townhill Junior School and Woodlands Community College are proposing to change their legal school category and acquire charitable status as a shared co-operative trust.
The proposed name is Reach Cooperative Trust.
Trust partners will be Southampton City Council and the Co-operative Schools Network , and “learners at each of the schools, parents, staff, members of the local community and local community organisations will be able to become members of the Trust.”
Bitterne Park School says in a letter to students, staff, the community and others: “We want to continue to raise expectations and standards in the school and improve the future prospects for all of our learners… To do this – with the many changes taking place in education – we need to build strong partnerships and make our school improvement planning more sustainable… We believe that to meet the needs of our community, we can achieve more through formal education partnerships, than we will be able to by working alone”.
It says that as a cooperative education trust, “We will adopt and support the values and principles of the co-operative movement in our work.”
There’s more information about co-op values and principles on the International Co-operative Alliance and Co-operatives UK websites.
There’s more information about the proposals on most of the school’s websites – for example from this Bitterne Park School page.
Details about the consultation, dates and locations of consultation meetings which are taking place this month (at BPS there's a community meeting on the June 17, 2019 at 6pm), and information on how to respond are given in this document (scroll for dates of meetings).
