It has been announced that Thanet’s poorest-performing secondary schools could face closure or be turned into academies if they do not improve. Yesterday the Government announced plans and revealed that six schools are facing the measures if they are still under-performing in 2011.

The schools affected are as follow: Charles Dickens School, St George’s, Hereson School, King Ethelbert School, Marlowe Academy and Hartsdown Technology College.

All these schools have been told they need to break the 30 per cent figure for five GCSE grade A to C passes including English and maths. Hartsdown head-teacher Andy Somers said that “We had the best exam results in 50 years last year and are sure we will improve that again. However, we very rarely get students who come here who are good at English and maths. Results in those two individual subjects are very good, but the students who are good at both tend to go to grammar schools. We are putting a lot of support into literacy and numeracy and we are seeing our results improve year on year, but we won’t see us make 30 per cent this year and we won’t make it next year.”

Mr Somers went on to say that “In Kent we have a grammar school system and they take 20 to 30 per cent of the top-performing students, which, with falling rolls due to a falling birth rate, means the grammar schools are still full. From our point of view that means the ability of the students we take in is getting lower and lower each year.”

The Government is targeting 638 schools in England, 32 of which are in Kent.

Just imagine what will happen if they did close these schools it would then mean as parents we would have to travel to places like Canterbury just to take our children to school. This is just silly.

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