Charlie Illsley, 15, is reducing the grownups to tears as he explains what his school, closing after 62 years, has meant to him. Sitting around a table in a Coventry pub not far from Woodlands academy, parents gathered last month to tell Education Guardian of their sadness are reaching for the tissues.
Charlie, whose uncle and older brother attended the school, one of England’s first purpose-built comprehensives, says: “It’s the history that is going with this school. I was walking to school and an old man asked me which house I was in at Woodlands, as he went there. As a student going through this, it’s been bloody difficult.”
Arran Pallan, 18, was among the last students to get their A-level results at the school last week. “I arrived here in year 7 thinking I would not get five GCSEs. I have 14. I feel so sad the school is no longer going to be here.”
To parents and pupils who campaigned against its closure, the demise of Woodlands, a distinctive secondary sitting in sprawling grounds that has long enjoyed a stellar reputation for sport, is a sign of the times, a product of the forces working on schools across England through a combination of the government’s free schools and academies policies.
Those forces, say the five parents and two pupils around the table, have needlessly pushed the school into closure, because ministers – in charge of its destiny as an academy – believe competition for pupils is good for education even if the result is that schools close. Meanwhile, millions of pounds were spent, the parents say, on creating three new free schools, which hastened that closure, when Woodlands could have been saved for much less money.
Woodlands effectively closed last month, after a decision to move its boys – the school was the city’s only all-boys state school – to be educated alongside girls at the neighbouring Tile Hill Wood school from September. It will cease altogether as an entity in September 2017, with a new Coventry West academy combining boys and girls on the Tile Hill Wood site.
Woodlands, one of England’s first 20 comprehensives when founded in 1954, enjoys a place in a noted history of education. The late Brian Simon’s book Education and the Social Order: British Education since 1944 says that by 1965 it was making national waves as its headmaster tried replacing academic streaming for younger pupils with mixed-ability teaching.
“No one could accuse this school of embracing a sloppy … progressivism” as “gowns were worn, discipline stressed, hard work, class teaching and homework were the rule”, wrote Simon.
Indeed, aspects of a traditionalist, almost private-school ethos survived to 2016. The school had a house system with head boys and deputies, prefects and pupils acting as “mentors” to younger peers. Departing students and parents say these practices lent valuable experience and CV points to their beneficiaries.
The school was known for performing arts but particularly sport, and above all, rugby. Former pupils include England internationals Neil Back, Danny Grewcock and Tom Wood, alongside the former world record holding runner David Moorcroft.
But recent years have been turbulent. The school became an academy in 2011. Its last annual accounts reveal it faced a “short-term financial crisis” based on a city-wide pupil population slump, teachers’ pay increases, which were unfunded by the government, and the opening of several new schools.
Although Woodlands is fiercely defended by parents, it was rated “requires improvement” by Ofsted in 2013. Last summer, GCSE results also fell below government floor targets. Pupil intake dropped to just over half of the school’s capacity last September.
Parents say the handling of Woodlands’ proposed closure, with the news seeping out on social media in March on the evening after new pupils had been given their places at the school from September, exacerbated their anguish.
But it is the issue of the free schools that is most contentious. In 2014, a Sikh-ethos school called Seva opened, along with Eden girls’ school, a Muslim secondary. The latter put pressure on Tile Hill Wood numbers, which in turn led, Woodlands parents say, to Tile Hill Wood wanting the merger with Woodlands.
The opening of another free school, three miles from Woodlands, Finham Park 2, is most controversial of all. This is run by an outstanding secondary operating in a more affluent area of Coventry. The Department for Education’s own “impact assessment” of Finham Park 2’s likely effect on neighbouring schools, written before it opened, said: “Finham Park 2 may affect the long-term viability of [Woodlands]. However, rising basic need [for school places] will reduce the impact in due course.”
Coventry’s pupil population is expected to rise from 2018 but this will be too late to save Woodlands. Suzanne Gaut, who chose Woodlands for her two sons because of its all-boys ethos, is furious that the DfE has not done more to support it. She points to letters to former education secretary Nicky Morgan and free schools minister Lord Nash, which she says, apart from a brief non-committal response by Nash, went unanswered.
Gaut also compares Woodlands’ grounds – the school is surrounded by acres of playing fields, whose future is now unclear – to Finham Park 2’s home: a former Land Registry office, which parents say has no outside space.
This scenario, though, seemed to pit school against school. In a letter in April to Morgan, Gaut wrote that the government seemed intent on creating a dystopian “Hunger Games” scenario, whereby schools were set up and then left to fight it out to the death for pupils.
Gaut wrote: “How did education become survival of the fittest? What happens when the next school is approved? Do we go back into the [Hunger Games] arena again? How is an office block in the middle of an industrial estate the correct environment for an education establishment?”
In its free school application, Finham Park said pupils were losing out from not having access to a high-quality mixed secondary and that the new school would be an extension of its “demonstrably popular brand”. The three established schools in the area – the third, Westwood academy, is a co-ed comprehensive – were not attracting enough pupils and suffered from a “poor reputation among parents”.
Yet Gaut says her boys made an 18-mile daily round trip to experience Woodlands’ all-boys ethos and that this choice is now being denied her. “Our boys have just been caught in the middle of this,” she says. “Yet our boys matter. Why has no one thought more about them?”
To Gaut and others, such as the National Union of Teachers’ Jane Nellist, this is the human impact – the effect on children – of ideological arguments around “raising standards” by opening and closing schools.
Gaut has withdrawn her younger son, Charlie, because of the turbulence. Her older son, Harry, is in the middle of GCSE courses and so will finish them at Tile Hill Wood in year 11 from next month, but Gaut and other parents worry about the lack of continuity.
Some 200 Woodlands pupils walked out of lessons in protest at the closure plans in March and 3,800 people signed a petition.
Charlie Illsley has left Woodlands for Westwood because of the teachers leaving, even though this will mean a change in the middle of his GCSE course. He says: “I’ve been really affected by the timing of this. Halfway through our GCSEs, we find out the school is closing. I have to rethink my coursework now because I’m moving school. It’s not what I wanted. I wanted to finish at this school, with the teachers who knew me. That’s been taken away.”
Debbie Keay, whose son James has just finished year 10, says: “I have never seen him so upset. He saw some of his friends leaving, teachers going. The school is like a family and this is horrible.”
Another parent, Becky Jones, says she received news her younger son, Oliver, had got a place at Woodlands for September’s year 7, only to learn the same evening via Facebook of the closure. Oliver is off to Westwood with his older brother, Harry, who was in Woodlands year 9.
Gina O’Connor, headteacher of Tile Hill Wood, has also been running Woodlands since its former head went on gardening leave at Easter. She says: “We are concentrating on ensuring that all the children receive the good education they need and deserve from their local school. We now have excellent support from parents who also want to focus on supporting their children to succeed at the new school.”
Neither the DfE nor Finham Park school responded to requests for comment.
Nationally, soon after the first free schools were set up in 2011, ministers faced criticism for establishing them in areas with surplus places. Now they appear to be concentrating them in areas without spare capacity. This, and the coming secondary population boom, may help to reduce the number of Woodlands-type scenarios in future. But the sadness around this story is unmistakable.
A booklet printed for Woodlands’ final overseas rugby tour this summer is headlined: “The end of an era: the Woodlands School 1954-2016”.
It ends: “This tour brochure is dedicated to the thousands of students and staff who have attended and worked at this wonderful institution since 1954. This tour is a fitting tribute to all that has gone before, and the loss of such opportunities for future generations of Woodlands boys. Future memories will no longer be made.”
