Cuckoo Hall and Woodpecker Hall Academies set to amalgamate

Today we are announcing an exciting new future for two of our schools and their families.

Amalgamation will produce significant savings which will make the new combined school sustainable in the long term to ensure that we can provide the best possible education to the children in this area.

The decline in the numbers of primary aged children across Enfield and Edmonton applying for school places is causing problems for many schools. It is a particular problem on the eastern side of the Borough, where our schools are located.

This does however, also provide us with a great opportunity, and we have looked at what we could do to secure the future of schooling on the site.

Our Board of Trustees has considered and discussed various options.

The agreed option is to start the amalgamation of Cuckoo Hall and Woodpecker Hall. This would bring the two schools together to create a new school. This process would start with a single leadership team being established across both schools from September 2020.

The plan is to create a single, new school on the site with four forms of entry.

We are also considering plans for a new school construction to be added to the Woodpecker Hall buildings to sustain four forms of entry.

This would be financed by releasing some of the land we own on the overall site for sale, bringing to the area new state of the art teaching and learning facilities. The longer term plan includes the development of much needed affordable housing and valuable new community amenities.
 
In the event that this project did not go ahead, we would still need to amalgamate the schools and make better use of both sets of buildings and work within a sustainable budget.

We envisage that most staff will not be affected by the changes: the reduction in posts will be kept to a minimum.

Letters to parents

You can read the letter to Cuckoo parents here.

You can read the letter to Woodpecker parents here.