Not surprisingly, the headlines have been all about the battle for the old Wildernesse School site in Sevenoaks between the proposed new Trinity Christian Free School, the Secretary of State for Education being minded to award the site to the school, and the proposed new satellite grammar school sponsored by the  Valley Invicta Academy Trust, the land being currently owned by Kent County Council. You will find articles focusing on the Trinity School and the Satellite Grammar School below.

Meanwhile just one converter academy in Kent and Medway, Folkestone Christ Church CofE Primary School, has opened in March, the flow having reduced to a very small trickle in recent months. There are no new converter academy applications. We know that both Kent and Medway Local Authorities are working with an unspecified number of low achieving and failing primary schools encouraging/forcing them to become sponsored academies, usually taken over by one of the academy chains......

News about new academies and applications, site of Trinity Free School in Sevenoaks, controversy at proposed Free School in Wye, and a new proposal for a primary free school in Canterbury. 

Kent's three new secondary Free Schools, Hadlow Rural Community School, Sevenoaks Christian School and Wye Free School are all accepting applications for September 2013, and places will be offered independently from the KCC process for admission in 2013. This means that parents may apply to the Free Schools as well as completing the Kent Secondary admission form which allows up to four maintained schools to be named, with confidence that neither application will be harmed by the other. Schools will not be told if children have received a second offer elsewhere, so that such children will receive two offers on March 1st if they qualify for a place at one of the free schools.

I anticipate that this additional opportunity will encourage many double applications, so that the new schools may be swamped, and some of those offered places may well not be serious candidates. The down side of this is that of course 240 Kent children will be holding two offers in March 2013, when offers are made; and schools will have no idea which way those 240 children will go.........

Government has today given approval for 102 new Free Schools to be set up in England. You will find the full list here. The Department for Education makes great play of the fact that over two thirds of these are in the most deprived communities in the country, so Kent is clearly not typical in that its four schools are in leafy Hadlow, Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells and Wye. The schools have very different characters, and you will find more information and comment on them below and in my article on Free Schools (shortly to be updated). .............