I was going to mention this a week ago, but Richard Symonds has beaten me to it on his new blog. (One of an astonishing 27 which he has under his profile on Blogger! That is a serious habit – or would be if more than 2 of them were ever updated.)

Anyway, West Sussex County Council are proposing to close Abbotsford special needs school, near Burgess Hill. It got a bad report from OFSTED and was put into special measures, but rather than put any effort into getting it up to standard they have been running it down and now want to close it.

The school had a number of day pupils and a number of day-boarders. The first thing to go was the boarding element, it was easier than making the necessary repairs to the residential block. Having lost half the pupils that way they ended up with only about 30, which must make it hard to keep open for all sorts of economy of scale reasons.

Taken in isolation this is sad enough, and a familiar tactic often used for rural facilities like branch lines and sub-post offices – run something down to make it uneconomic and then close it for sound economic reasons – but there is an impact across the whole of the county.

West Sussex has few special needs schools, but a great demand. With the boarding element Abbotsford was in a position to offer places beyond the normal catchment area for such a school. Now there is nothing for secondary school children with special needs, unless they are fortunate enough to live near Crawley, which is not at all central to the county.

Within Crawley we have a very good special needs school – Manor Green in Ifield – but there is fierce competition for places there. For every child who is in Manor Green there must be several in mainstream schools who would benefit greatly from being there if only there was room for them.

Is this another knock-on effect of the tyranny of league tables for schools? I hope not. Surely the point of identifying poorly-performing schools is to target them for improvement and not to close them down to bring up the average? What I do know is that it will go ahead. With so few families affected, and them spread out across the county there will not be many signs of objection.

I will admit to having a slight emotional involvement in this. My own school was a boarding school. Not a special needs school, although in some ways it might as well have been: I went there as I was a bit of a tearaway in primary school and it was felt that I might benefit from going away to school instead of going on to the local comprehensive, which I think I did.

At the time Essex had three state comprehensive boarding schools, a very enlightened policy. These have since been amalgamated and I think the resulting school has changed status. My old school site was sold off, a lot of buildings were demolished and the rest turned into exclusive apartments, and now any kids in the position I was in will just go to the local comprehensive and turn out the way I would have done.

I can just see the same thing happening here now, and would not be surprised to see the Abbotsford school site become another upmarket housing scheme, with the proceeds going to Chichester.

The other development in West Sussex schools is the re-introduction of hot meals in primary schools. This is not the re-introduction of kitchens but something which sounds suspiciously like airline food, delivered to the school frozen and pre-packed in bulk and heated up in glorified microwave ovens. The thing is… I am loath to criticise it too much: I actually quite like airline meals.

When it comes to the quality of food you can just as easily have good and healthy microwave meals as you can have bad ‘properly’ cooked meals. As far as I can see, the biggest problem will be one of logistics. Putting kitchens back into schools would imply extra staff dedicated to cooking and serving the food – dinner ladies for want of a more PC term. These new meals will be served by the lunchtime assistants who already struggle to distribute and help with the nasty cold packed lunches which are currently supplied.

I had someone from a school elsewhere in town explain to me the other day about the difficulty in getting all the pupils fed in time at the moment. If the new system comes in without any additional staff it could be a disaster and the staff are not looking forward to it at all.