How the new Lord's Hill Academy might lookLocal Conservative Councillors yesterday announced that £13m of local council capital funding previously earmarked for Southampton's Building Schools for Future (BSF) programme would be protected.
This money will be combined with the new national national funding that we hope Southampton will receive when the government announces its replacement capital programme for schools.
The money will help to ensure that the city meets future demands for school places and that all Southampton's schools are brought up to a decent state of repair.
As well as lobbying for new government money and fighting to retain the £35m that local Conservatives secured for the city's two academies, we are pressing government to refund the £2.4m in aborted costs that the city council has incurred in preparing for the BSF scheme.
It is shameful that in these difficult economic times, when public sector funding is extremely tight, that local Labour Councillors are maintaining their opposition to the city's two academies and the additional funds to improve the schools, preferring for ideological reasons to see them split across two sites in out of date buildings.
