Lee Wright talks about the fight to save Burnholme Community College

LEE Wright is relaxing in the library at Burnholme Community College after sitting his maths GCSE. It was science the day before, maths this morning, he says, puffing out his cheeks.

And how did he do? “I was a bit nervous at first, but I think I did all right.”

Lee’s an ordinary 15 year old. He likes to hang out with his friends and loves football. Is he any good? “Um, not really,” he shrugs modestly.

“He is,” chips in Lee’s best mate Tom Williams. “He’s lying. He’s really good.” Lee looks suitably embarrassed.

Just another teenager, in other words. Except that this particular teenager has done something remarkable. He has written to The Queen and the Prime Minister, asking them to save his school.

“Burnholme is like my second home,” he wrote. “We are the closest community you will ever see… Closing this school down would be the biggest mistake anybody can ever make.”

That letter pushed him on to the front page of The Press, and led to his head teacher nominating him for a community pride award.

Lee has also spoken at a parents meeting called to debate the future of the school.

A 15-year-old boy fighting tooth and nail to keep his school open? What has got into him?

He just loves Burnholme, he says. “It’s always a good laugh. It is quite a small school, but if you went to a bigger school, you wouldn’t get the same attention you get here. All the teachers treat you as an individual. They know who you are. I know everybody here now.”

Lee’s little brother started at the school last September. “And he loves it here too,” Lee says.

That is why, when he heard the rumours about how the school might have to close, Lee decided to do something.

He was sitting at home one evening and he wrote the letter on his computer. “I just thought that The Queen and Gordon Brown could put in a big word and maybe help us.”

He was still a bit shocked at finding himself on the front page of The Press. He was walking down the street, he says, and a woman came up to him and said: “Have you seen the photo?”. “I said ‘no’ and she showed me the front page, as I was walking down the street.”

So what do his fellow pupils think? There have been a few comments, he grins, but most have been positive.

His friends Tom Williams and Kerryn Dutton, both 15, certainly support him.

The three met when they arrived at Burnholme four years ago. Tom and Lee bumped into each other when they were wandering around their new ‘big’ school feeling lost – and they have been inseparable ever since.

Even so, Tom admits he “didn’t have a clue” about what his friend had done until he saw him in the newspaper.

He saw a headline about a 15-year-old boy trying to have his school, but didn’t dream it was Lee until he got to school and everyone was talking about it. “It [the headline] was about my best mate!” he says.

Kerryn was equally surprised. “He’s usually quite quiet,” she says. “But good on him. It takes guts to do something like that.”

Kerryn and Tom agree with Lee that Burnholme is a school very much worth saving.

She didn’t actually want to come to Burnholme, Kerryn admits. “All my friends went to Archies, and I ended up at Burnholme.” But she’s really glad she did now.

Once the school had a bit of a reputation as the place where “all the bad kids go”.

“But it’s not like that at all,” she says, indignantly. “It is a really good school.”

She too points to the school’s small size as an advantage. She has friends who go to Huntington School, she says. There’s nothing wrong with that school. “But some of the teachers don’t know all the students in the same year. Some of the pupils don’t even know some of the others in the same year. Here, you are seen as a person, as an individual.”

Tom’s mum had always wanted him to go to Fulford School. But, like Kerryn, he has never regretted coming to Burnholme.

“Small is better,” he says. “Teachers have more time with the students. And they all want us to have a good education.”

Tom was one of the pupils spoken to by Ofsted officials when they came round for the latest report, which was very favourable. He was happy to give them a good report, he says.

His mum has also clearly come round to the school. Tom’s sister, Jess, who is ten, will be starting at Burnholme in September. “She can’t wait.”

All three appear to be having a good education. They sit their main GCSEs next year and want to go on to further or higher education.

Lee visited Askham Bryan College with Tom recently and is interested in training to be a landscape designer. Tom wants to become a PE teacher. Kerryn, meanwhile, plans to study business and law at university. “I want to become a corporate lawyer,” she says.

All agree, however, that the uncertainty over the school’s future is unsettling and worrying.

Which is why Lee felt he had to do something.

“At least, if the worst happens, I can’t say I haven’t played my part,” he says. “I have tried.”

Governors start ‘recovery plan’

BURNHOLME School recently secured its best Ofsted report and last year won its best haul of GCSEs.

If once this was a school with a bit of a reputation, clearly things have changed.

Coun Carol Runciman, City of York Council’s executive member for children’s services, agrees there is no question that it is providing a good education to pupils. The recent Ofsted result – which ranked the school as good overall – demonstrated that, she said.

The problem is falling pupil numbers. The school has a capacity of 600, but only 374 pupils on the roll. That makes it York’s smallest secondary school.

Burnholme’s governors, however, are doing all they can to save the school.

They have produced a “recovery plan” setting out how the school could have a viable and thriving future, which has been submitted to education bosses at the city council.

Continuing to deliver a good education to the children who come to the school is clearly a central plank of that plan, says chair of governors Kim Daniells.

“You only get one chance to be educated, and we must never let down our young people. Ofsted has just found that we are delivering a good education, and we want to go on doing that.”

But the recovery plan also looks at how the school could become much more of a focal point for the community.

There is already a nursery there, and adult education classes. “But we want our facilities to be more widely used, with additional facilities like a community café where members of the local community can come.”

School numbers may be low at the moment, Ms Daniells agrees, but there is every reason to suppose they will start to rise. Derwenthorpe will increase the number of pupils in the catchment area – and there is evidence more generally that over the next five to ten years there will be an increase in the number of children going to secondary school.

It would be a tragedy for the school to be closed now, only to have to reopen in a few years time, she says.

But for now, the uncertainty continues. The city council has promised that it will respond to the school’s recovery plan by the end of the summer term on July 17.

And will it be good news or bad?

Coun Runciman won’t be drawn. “I don’t really want to go there,” she says. “But I sincerely hope that it is. The school offers a good education, Ofsted have said so. But it needs more children through the door.”

The council’s response to the governors’ plan will probably take the form of a number of options for the school’s future, Coun Runciman said.

One of the options may be closure. “If we ever get to that stage. We haven’t got there yet.”

But whatever happens, she said, members of the public will be fully consulted before any final decisions are made.

So now is the time for those who want to save the school to be speaking out.

Lee Wright’s letter to The Queen, and the publicity it has generated, couldn’t have been better timed.