Hands off Preston Park

12.00.00am GMT Tue 1st Dec 2009

Dari Taylor MP has joined Ingleby Barwick Independent councillors in calling for Egglescliffe School to be moved into Preston Park. Eaglescliffe residents are furious. Councillors John Fletcher, Alan Lewis and Maureen Rigg have been inundated with emails, phone calls and personal calls from people complaining about it.

Maureen Rigg wrote to the local press as follows:

Many residents of Eaglescliffe have today received a letter from their MP, Mrs Dari Taylor, extolling the virtues of rebuilding Egglescliffe School in Preston Park. This suggestion was first made publicly by councillors for Ingleby Barwick who are rightly concerned at the lack of secondary school places in that part of the borough.

Mrs Taylor has taken up the cause with apparent enthusiasm which has blinded her to a number of facts:

Building Schools for the Future is not focused on relocating Egglescliffe School but on rebuilding it in order to give a building which matches the education available at that school. The current plan is to relocate the school onto the playing fields at Allens West.

She states "the majority of pupils will have to cross an increasingly busy railway line". This displays her ignorance of the site. The only pupils who will cross the railway line are those who cross it now to reach the present site. These are the pupils who live on the Kingsmead estate and in rural areas to the North.

She describes 300 pupils from Ingleby Barwick as essential to the viability of Egglescliffe school but the present proposals envisage only 150 pupils from Ingleby Barwick as there will be a corresponding increase in size of All Saints School at Ingleby Barwick.

The Liberal Democrat councillors elected to represent the people of Eaglescliffe have carried out our own surveys of local residents and found a large majority of them strongly oppose the idea of building in Preston Park. These are the people who know Eaglescliffe, live in Eaglescliffe, appreciate and use both the Park and the School. They know that Dari Taylor does not know Eaglescliffe, nor the Park nor the school or she could never have written such a letter. No doubt they will show their disapproval when the General Election comes.

You can sign our petition against the proposal to build at Preston Park at http://tinyurl.com/yhegykn