School expands facilities before it goes fully co-ed

AN independent school is creating new facilities to accommodate a growing number of pupils.

By September next year, Shiplake College will have added 10 classrooms and five science labs to its campus off Reading Road.

This follows the school’s decision to go fully co-educational from September last year, having already taken girls in the sixth form.

It had a record 74 girls in its sixth form in the academic year that has just ended and 27 girls in year 7.

But by 2027, the school is set to be mixed in every year and its roll will have risen from 520 to around 600.

The school says the new facilities will ensure that its class sizes will remain small and represent value for money in the face of the new Government’s plans to end the VAT exemption on independent schools, which is likely to mean higher fees.

The new facilities include a four-classroom English block in the lower school which opened in January.

Another six have been relocated to a former admin block and are due to open at the start of the new school year in September.

The new science labs will be in the former English block.

The school also has planning permission for a two-storey, four- classroom extension to an existing building at the rear of its campus.

Other additions include sports fields on land the college owns off the A4155 Reading-Henley road.

These will include a new sand-dressed artificial pitch suitable for sports such as hockey, tennis and netball, a 3G multi-use games area for football and rugby training and three non-turf cricket nets. Headmaster Tyrone Howe, who joined the school in 2019, said: “Most of the work is sort of reconfiguration of existing buildings as this is a finite site.

“The feedback that I get more often than anything else is about the sense of community at Shiplake and that is something I want to protect.

“We also see the school as having a capacity and we certainly don’t want to go much higher than the 600 mark. That is the number we feel is right to be a really strong co-educational school.

“The key drivers are the evolution of the school both in terms of
being co-educational and the impact on our overall pupil numbers.

“Sixteen is the biggest class size that we have and that’s a true unique selling point of the school. It’s something that the parents value so it’s really important that we protect that.”

The school says that all the development projects have been carefully budgeted for and it has been setting money aside to cover the cost.

Bursar Will Dixon said: “A new government and the likely introduction of VAT means our parents are going to be put under extra financial pressure. All these decisions have been planned on that coming in.

“[Parents] are already making a big financial commitment to their children’s education by sending them to a school like Shiplake, so when we spend money it has got to be on what is going to absolutely improve the offering. We are acutely aware of the potential financial strain that will be placed on many of our families and we will do whatever we can to help them with that.

“Where we can create cost savings we will pass that on to parents.

“We’re also committed to looking at our fee levels and potentially reducing those to the extent of meeting parents halfway.

“That’s because we recognise that the parents are already sacrificing an awful lot and we want to try to minimise the burden on them where we can.”

Mr Howe said: “All the projects that we are currently working on have been budgeted for and the money has been set aside.

“We’ve been hoping to do these things for quite a long time and we’re always trying to work from a strategic plan.”

Mr Howe said the new sports facilities, which are likely to cost at least £1 million, would improve the facilities for girls.

He said: “Clearly, the most important aspect has to be our academics but character development is a hugely important feature of the Shiplake experience and outdoor activities and sports are a core part of that alongside art, music and drama.

“One of the things we have been missing is full-size artificial pitch for hockey and with the girls coming through hockey is a major sport for us.

“We want to really give the girls as positive an experience as possible and this is going to mean that we’re not going to have to transport pupils to either Henley or Reading to play.

“At the same time we’re very keen to involve the local community as we do during the week.” Mr Howe said the new pitches would prevent the school from having to cancel sports lessons due to poor weather affecting the existing facilities.

He said: “Our playing pitches have been out of action since November because of flooding.

“It’s extraordinary the level of flooding that we’ve experienced. This is my fifth year at the school and every single year they’ve been out of use early in our autumn term due to flooding.

“This means that we can actually manage our fixtures far better and have greater participation across different sports.

“It takes the pressure off the front of school, where we’ve got football training and matches and need to get it ready for cricket in the summer.”

Following criticism by Shiplake Parish Council, the school says it has made an effort to mitigate the impact of the new sports pitches.

It has planted several acres of wildflowers and 1,000 trees for the hedgerow.

Mr Dixon said: “We’ve worked with a brilliant designer to come up with a net positive impact of the work.

“There’s going be things like outdoor classrooms and ponds and we are hoping to have beehives.”

Reading Blue Coat School in Sonning opened its door to girls last year with the aim of becoming fully co-educational by 2027.

The number of single-sex independent schools has roughly halved since the Nineties and they now make up 17 per cent of the total.