Proposed Kinsgate School expansion - is it too late for a rethink?

Camden have come up with a proposal to help solve the problem of the shortage of primary school places locally which involves providing a new school on an area called Liddell Road. Many people in Fortune Green will not have heard of it as it is an industrial estate just off Maygrove/Iverson Roads backing onto the railway line and the Sidings Peace Park. It has been considered as a potential site for a future new school for some time (back when the Council was run by the LibDem/Conservatives) but since then the landscape has changed.

Under the present Government, the only new schools that can be built are Free Schools or Academies. Unfortunately, the current Labour Administration in Camden are ideologically opposed to these options, even though academies were introduced by the last Labour Government and the new Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt has stated that the bulk of existing free schools would be kept open as his party wanted to "keep the good free schools". ) Instead of creating a new primary school for the area, Camden’s current administration are therefore promoting the expansion of an existing school (Kingsgate) funded by building homes for sale on the site and throwing off all the existing businesses.

Everyone agrees that the need for additional school places in the area is a high priority, but we believe that this approach is flawed. Kingsgate is rated as an “Outstanding” school, and its success and educational provision to local children should not be compromised by political expediency.

Our response to the Council includes the following key points:
1) There is no good educational case to be made to have a school based on two sites, a mile apart with railway lines in between, with no clear access route between the two. Further, it could have a harmful effect on the community feeling of the existing Kingsgate School.
2) The increase of 412 additional pupils on the new site will add to traffic and pedestrian congestion on West End Lane and Kilburn High Road especially during peak morning rush hours with families travelling to, between and from the two sites. It is not likely to be acceptable or attractive to families.
3) If an application had been made to build a Free School or Academy, the funding would come from Central Government and so there would be no need for Camden Council to raise money through selling off the land to developers to build expensive homes for sale (120-160 units) and, in the process, putting 250 people who work in the existing businesses out of work. 

While this complicated and flawed scheme has been progressed by the current administration with painful slowness, two new primary schools (Free Schools) in Camden have been through the whole process and opened with central government funding. This new school "extension" would not be open until at lest 2016.