Threatened grammar set to survive

St Joseph's seems likely to remain open

A grammar school which was threatened with closure looks increasingly likely to stay open.

St Joseph's College in Stoke would have been the first grammar to be closed since Labour came into power.

The school faced closure as part of a major re-organisation of schools proposed by the private company that runs the city's education services.

Head teacher, Roisin Maguire, met Schools Minister Jim Knight in her campaign to keep the school open.

Ms Maguire says that a council re-think seems set to give the school a reprieve - but since there is no official confirmation the school is still planning to hand in a petition to 10, Downing Street on Friday.

'Flawed'

In a meeting this week with the city's mayor, Ms Maguire said she was told he was "minded" to drop plans for closure.

The formal period of consultation also ends this week - after which the school expects to hear the decision on its future.

National attention was focused on the school last autumn when a shake-up of Stoke education threatened to close St Joseph's, along with all the other secondary schools in the city - to be replaced by a smaller number of new institutions.

Under these plans, St Joseph's College, a selective Catholic school with the best exam results in the city, would have become the first grammar to disappear under the present government.

The distancing of David Cameron's Conservatives from grammars added to the political sensitivity.

Local Labour MP, Robert Flello, supporting the campaign against the closure plans, described the threat to close St Joseph's and other schools in the city as "fundamentally flawed" and "ridiculous".

Ms Maguire and other local head teachers put the case against closing the city's schools to education ministers.

Facebook

Schools Minister Jim Knight had been contacted about the Stoke schools' campaign via his Facebook account by a pupil at another threatened school, St Thomas More Catholic College.

Becky Grocott, a 17 year old at the school, had received a reply from the minister - and he later commended her for her initiative.

St Joseph's is a selective school, but entrance is not based on a straightforward 11-plus system. Instead it has a test which requires pupils to have reached level four (the expected level for 11 year olds) in three subjects.

After this cut-off point, it gives preference to Catholic pupils, with a proportion of places also allocated for non-Catholics.