Fight to Save School in Perfect Harmony

By LAURA NAYLOR

Children and their parents staged a singing protest against plans to close their school.

Pupils from Sandbach Primary School were joined by their mums and dads outside the town hall yesterday evening.

Their protest was timed to correspond with a consultation about Cheshire County Council’s plans to revitalise education in Congleton, Sandbach, Alsager and Holmes Chapel, which was taking place inside the building.

More than 200 people gathered outside with placards and banners, and sang We’re All In This Together, from the Disney hit High School Musical.

Youngsters also marched around chanting: “If every child matters, why don’t I?”

The council wants to close Sandbach Primary School, in Crewe Road – whose surplus places are among the highest in the area – by 2010. It also proposes to shut Church Lawton Primary School in September next year.

Under the Transforming Learning Communities (TLC) review, which aims to remove surplus school places and use cash more effectively in the county, pupils from Church Lawton would be relocated to other schools and the building used to re-house Alsager’s St Gabriel’s Catholic Primary School.

Sandbach’s building could become available as a shared resource for six high schools in the area, to deliver a new curriculum for 14 to 19-year-olds.

Four new children’s centres have also been proposed at Daven Primary School in Congleton, Offley Primary School in Sandbach, the new health centre in Alsager and, at a site yet to be identified in Holmes Chapel.

Sarah Cooper and Caroline Roughley organised yesterday’s protest.

Mrs Cooper, aged 30, who has two children, Christopher, aged 10, and six-year-old Taylor at Sandbach Primary, said: “If we go down, we will go down fighting. Ours is a community school, with fantastic teachers and a great headteacher.

“The school has come on in leaps and bounds, and it should not be closed.”

Mrs Roughley, whose eight-year-old daughter Sarah attends the school, said she could not understand why the council wants to close it.

The 36-year-old said: “Everyone is gobsmacked.

“The majority of children walk to school, and they won’t be able to do that if it closes. They will lose friendships.

“The Government is saying ‘Every Child Matters’ – but why don’t ours?”

Full-time mum Laura Sharpes, aged 31, added: “The plans to close the school are rubbish.

“It will cause so much congestion and will unsettle the kids at both schools.

“My children Chloe, aged 11, and Joseph, aged five, go to Sandbach Primary, and it’s an excellent school.”

Shelley Barnes, aged 41, runs an after-school and holiday club – looking after pupils while their parents are at work.

She said: “If they shut this school the children will lose the extended classes, and would be devastated.”

Yesterday morning many parents drove to Offley Primary School to show the congestion problems which would arise if the pupils were moved there.

Mrs Barnes added: “It was utter chaos. People couldn’t park, and the neighbours were complaining.”

Sandbach Primary School pupil Suranne Kennerley, aged three, said she did not want to change schools, and year one pupil Thomas Jack Harland, aged six, added: “I have a lot of friends at the school and I don’t want to go to a different one.”

(c) 2008 Sentinel, The (Stoke-on-Trent UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.