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Lowick school forced to close Matthew Brown reports on the demise of the country's only co-operative school Lowick
New School, the tiny Lake District primary which became the first co-operative
school in the country last year, has been forced to close. After a
three-year fight against closure and a year of striving to survive without state
support, the 16-pupil primary failed to raise enough money to stay open beyond
the end of the summer term. ‘We
have learned a lot, we have achieved a lot and we are absolutely sad and
devastated,’ the school’s headteacher Shirley Rainbow told The Westmorland
Gazette. ‘But we cannot go on because we haven’t got financial security and
we haven’t been able to attract enough new children.’ The
story of Lowick’s three-year battle against closure was featured
in Democratic Socialist, Autumn 2004, and fills a chapter of the recent ILP
pamphlet, Co-operatives and Mutuals: The new challenge. After
fighting Cumbria County Council’s School Organising Committee and being
rejected by a judicial review, the teachers and parents at Lowick formed a
community co-op last year to try and attract state funding as a new kind of
school. They hoped the legislation which has enabled a number of faith groups to
open new schools would allow them to be funded as the country’s first
co-operatively-run and managed primary. Lowick argued that the values of the
co-operative movement stood as its defining ethos, just as religious values are
put forward by faith groups in their applications to run state-supported
voluntary-aided schools. After
being rejected again by the county council last summer, they appealed to the
Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to reverse the decision but lost the
case in August 2004, just weeks before the new term. Undeterred, the community
of Lowick decided to keep the school going as a non-fee paying independent,
raising funds from the Co-operative Retail Group, sales of a charity CD, and
other community initiatives to stay afloat. Lowick became a celebrated cause of
the co-operative movement, but although the staff worked without pay for much of
the year, it couldn’t survive. High
and dry Ironically,
while a school that attempted to establish itself on co-operative grounds has
been left high and dry by both local and national governments, the number of
faith-based schools continues to grow, as weekly headlines in the Times
Educational Supplement testify. ‘Secular schools rush to convert’ was just
one, on 15 July, the very day Lowick shut its doors. The story reported that
some 45 secondaries have applied to become voluntary-aided CofE schools since
2001, including more than 20 Academies sponsored by the church. The first
state-funded Hindu school will soon open in north London, adding to the 7,000
Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh schools, three quarters of which are
primaries. Defiant
as ever, the Lowick co-operative is not giving up on local education. It plans
to run the school buildings as an arts and educational resource centre for the
local community and other schools. ‘What the caterpillar calls the end, we see
as a butterfly,’ says Rose Bugler, Lowick’s chair of governors.
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