Kent County Council has now applied for Planning Permission for the controversial new secondary school in Thanet, exposing further problems with the project.
The background to the new school briefly is that, first of all, KCC overestimated the number of secondary aged children coming through the system in Thanet to justify commissioning a new school. The Council then backtracked, with the 2020-2024 Kent Schools Commissioning Plan explaining (p137) how they could comfortably manage the small long term pupil number deficit by expanding two of the District’s six non-selective schools.
![Park Crescent Academy]()
The real problem is that two of the Thanet schools are so unpopular with some families to the extent that 189 children were allocated to them in March who never applied to either. Others were offered places in Sandwich and Deal schools, some miles away. The full background to the controversy is explained here. When the new school opens, with a planned intake of 180 children, at least one of these schools is likely to become unviable. As a result, KCC’s introduction to the Planning Permission Consultation is quite simply dishonest, as explained below.
One of the problems with the new school, now to be called Park Crescent Academy after one of the adjacent roads, is that the site on which it is to be built is very cramped as can be seen from the projection above, and explained below. The new academy will replace the residential Royal School for the Deaf which was closed down in 2015. This closure followed a scandal when the physical abuse of some older children was exposed. One of the consequences of the limited space, set out below, is that the school will have no sixth form.
I have explored the issues behind the decision to build the new school in two previous articles. The first looks at the decision to veto the whole project by the then Leader of Kent County Council, Paul Carter back in October 2019, on the fairly obvious grounds that the additional places are not necessary, although this would have continued to force families to send their children to two unpopular schools. The second considers the consequences of the government decision in April by the government’s Schools Minister to overrule the veto and reinstate the project, reportedly with the encouragement of KCC officers. The planning permission consultation understandably ignores these matters, but now exposes the nature of the very confined site for the new school, which is another critical problem for the project.
Kent County Council’s latest claim The Council has tried several alternative justifications for the two contradictory solutions to the problems with school provision in Thanet. The latest, contained in the Public Consultation document is:
| The new school is required to meet the growth in the secondary school aged population and demand for future housing as well as addressing the more recent change in travel to school patterns where a growing number of Thanet children now travel to Sandwich for their Secondary education. As demand for secondary school places in Sandwich and Deal puts further pressure on secondary places from September 2023, it is hoped that the new school in Thanet will enable children to attend school more locally thereby allowing children in Deal and Sandwich to access their local schools’. |
There is no mention that this claim directly contradicts the entry on Page 137 of Kent’s own Commissioning Plan for Thanet secondary schools. This shows there willbe no shortage of places when the expansions of two good local schools, Ursuline Academy and King Ethelbert's School, takes place. There is no mention in the quotation that the growing demand for secondary school places in Sandwich and Deal is from families trying to avoid Hartsdown Academy and Royal Harbour Academy where there is plenty of room for them. A school bus now runs to Sandwich Technology College from as far away as Birchington. The distance these pupils are prepared to travel is an indictment of the perceived quality of the current provision. Certainly, the final sentence in the quotation above is completely untrue and dishonest. For, according to the Commissioning Plan there is already room for all Thanet children to attend school locally and children in Deal and Sandwich will always be able to access their local schools, by virtue of living nearest!
The picture at the head of this article and the plan below clearly indicate the problems with this plan, or I suspect any other design, on this cramped space set inside an established residential area, on two distinct levels and adjacent to a graveyard.
‘The site is divided in two plateaus by a landscaped slope from southwest to northeast. This divide constitutes a major constraint within the site…The south boundary is dominated by a retaining wall supporting an almost 4m drop from the rear of the properties on Byron Road down to the level of the site. The solution to the latter unattractive feature, so close up to the main building has been to focus the view from most classrooms in the opposite direction 'to provide uninterrupted views to the sports field and the surrounding area'. However, it will create a most unpleasant corridor between the two. The need to accommodate 900 pupils requires the school to extend to three storeys and is horribly reminiscent of the problems that dogged Kent’s other new school built with such constraints on a restricted site, Ebbsfleet Academy. However, 'The east wing, (closer to the south site boundary) is comprised of two storeys. This reduced height combined with the level drop from Byron Avenue reduces the impact of the new school on the adjacent properties', yet another constraint. There is no mention of how all areas of the new school, with its split levels and three/two storey arrangement, will be easily accessible to disabled children.
Pedestrian access is from either of the two roads adjacent to the site. However, the nature of the building design is such that in both cases there has to be a considerable walk for pedestrians to reach either entrance to the buildings, as shown in the access plan in the proposal. We must await further details of the configuration of Reception to see how this is managed.
![Plan of Park Crescent Academy Plan]()
‘The lower plateau of the site will accommodate the outdoor grass pitches and the multi-use games area. These areas as well as the sports hall are likely to be open for after-school hours community use. The location of the outdoor pitches, away from the boundaries have been carefully considered to limit the impact on the adjacent residential properties’. Once again the restricted site constrains the plan, in this case by minimising available recreation and sporting space.
The projection picture shows there is just one full-sized and one small grass games pitch outside, together with three or four hard games courts. The sports hall plan shows it has capacity for one large indoor games pitch, which can be sub-divided into four badminton courts. Quite simply, the total is not acceptable as sufficient sports provision for a six form entry school. The irony is that at Hartsdown Academy, the school most at risk from the opening of Park Crescent, there is a large area of grassed playing field.
But there are to be 96 racks for cycles as a response to government priorities, certainly an overprovision for the next four years, and probably forever!
The reason there is no sixth form planned is quite simply there is no room for one on the site. Currently of the six Kent secondary schools currently with no sixth form, two are in Thanet. As a result of the new school arriving all-through opportunities for pupils, limited already, will decrease further comparative to the rest of the county. For no other Kent District has more than one such school, whilst Thanet will have three.
The site plan shows four areas inside the school boundary, but not designated for any purpose. One is the hydrotherapy pool and gym complex, another is residential accommodation, both left over from the Royal School for The Deaf. The other two contain unspecified buildings. There is no mention of these anywhere in the plan. What will happen to these areas?
I have been criticised for my analysis of problems at the two heavily undersubscribed schools, but the nature of these problems are in one sense irrelevant. The bottom line is that too many Thanet families will do whatever is possible to avoid them, otherwise, there would be no need for a new school. Hartsdown has plenty of room to expand and Royal Harbour is planned to do so in the short term in the event of no new school. Meanwhile, King Ethelbert and St George’s CofE, two of the other three local schools, are the second and third most oversubscribed non-selective schools in the county.
'Inspired by the aesthetic and textures of the seaside and chalk cliffs, the architectural language aims to provide a contemporary and timeless look. The simplicity of the external design of the buildings aims to create a simple architectural language that offers a robust outlook allowing them to have a strong presence and identity within the site'.
