SCC - JW - Meadowcroft Infants School Expansion

The School Basic Need Capital Programme is aligned with Surrey's Community Vision 2030, which seeks to realise the local area's ambition that everyone benefits from education, skills and employment opportunities that help them to succeed in life. 2. The local authority (LA) has a duty to provide sufficient school places to meet demand as set out in the Education Act 1996 as subsequently amended. This duty applies to any status of publicly funded schools be that community, voluntary controlled, foundation, voluntary aided, academy, and academies in multi-academy trusts. The current forecast of mainstream school places indicates the need for additional places across a ten-year period. Forecasts are made using planning areas and these are groups of schools that reflect the local geography, reasonable travel distances and existing pupil movement patterns. These may include schools in different boroughs or districts. Birth data underpins all forecasts and is collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) by electoral ward. 3. The need for additional school places is either provided directly via Government (Department for Education), Developer contribution, School direct delivery or through Local Authority (LA) delivery. 4. Each year the LA completes a School Capacity survey known as SCAP, for the Department for Education (DfE), and this examines the primary and secondary school places available in planning areas against the forecast demand of places in the relevant areas. Where there is a demonstrable deficit of places the DFE allocate Basic Need grant funding to the LA by primary and or secondary against the shortfall. The amount of grant funding each year from 2011/12 to 2025/26 is shown at £445,086,022 of Basic Need grant allocated to Surrey CC during this period. 5. Basic need funding is intended to support the creation of mainstream places for pupils aged 5 to 16. Local authorities can use this funding to create places in whole new schools (via the 'free school presumption' process) or through the expansion or re-modelling of existing schools. The DfE expect that local authorities will work with any school in their local area in doing so, including academies and free schools. 6. Between 2009/10 and 2021/22 Surrey provided 14,758 new primary and 8,874 new secondary places meeting the demand for places across the planning areas. Already planned for delivery between 2021/22 and 2024/25 are 990 secondary school places. Estimated additional places still needed to meet demand in 2024/25 are 1,520 places for primary and 1,910 places for secondary schools 7. The Meadowcroft Infants School Expansion Project forms part of the above SBN Strategy , and will develop the school into a 1 FE all through Junior School providing 120 additional pupil places in the county.