Jon De Maria is a co founder of the Neighbourhood School Campaign (NSC) for Wandsworth. The NSC is aiming to establish a secular, non-selective school where the disused Bolingbroke Hospital stands. 3,000 people including various politicians have shown their support for the project. However, there has been a lot of opposition to it too - perhaps this interview with Mr De Maria will help you make up your mind over whether you think there should be a new secondary school in Wandsworth.

What inspired the Neighbourhood School Campaign for Wandsworth?

The borough has, across the whole country, the lowest percent of offering parents their preferred choice of secondary school. We’re bottom of the UK Choice League. In some ways that’s a good thing. It means the schools in the borough are successful. In other ways, it’s a bad thing because we’re in the middle of a borough that gets disengaged from the available state schools because of distance. When children leave the main primary schools around this area - Belleville, Highview and Honeywell - their kids from one year group end up at about fifty different schools. We want to instil a love for learning into our children through setting up this non-selective, secular school. Children trust parents to do the right thing so that’s what we’re doing with this campaign.

Some of our readers feel the existing schools should come first...

The facts are, if you exclude the faith schools, out of the nine borough state schools left, there are only two that are not oversubscribed – Southfields and Elliot School. For September ’09, Battersea Park School had three places, Burntwood had zero, Chestnut Grove had zero, Ernest Bevin had zero, Graveney had zero... the list goes on... So people’s perception is something different. The reality is in the council statistics. All the non-faith schools bar Elliot and Southfield are oversubscribed.

The school you propose is set to be a Free School. Bearing in mind that Free Schools are a Conservative policy, is the NSC politically motivated?

The NSC from day one is entirely non-political. We hadn’t heard about free schools in July last year when we came up with the idea for the Bolingbroke school. We would have been happy if the council had run it as a maintained school but that’s not the way the political wind is blowing at the moment so we’ve gone down the free school route. We’ve had cross-party support for our school. Battersea’s former Labour MP Martin Linton helped us kickstart out campaign. Then around the election, he along with Jane Ellison, now our MP, and the Liberal candidate Layla Moran all supported our campaign. Before the election, Ed Balls wrote to the council saying we had a case for our school based on demand. And since then, we’ve met with Michael Gove and briefly with David Cameron. The political leverage is important but we’re not aligned with any political views.

Will parents be running the school?

The relationship between the parents and the school provider is critical. We’ve adopted ARK. There are so many stakeholders in the project but ARK are our partner because they know about schools. Here’s an analogy we always use: if we were campaigning for a hospital, we wouldn’t wish to operate on the patients because we’re not doctors or nurses. We have to trust the experts to operate the school. ARK have done it successfully, they’re an academy provider which is the route the coalition’s free schools and academies is going down.

A number of our readers believe the NSC is campaigning because of the prevalence of faith schools in Battersea – is this true?

No. We’re not against any of the other schools. We are meeting the heads of other schools. The reason we hope we’re going to get the school is because it’s supported by 3,000 plus people. The problem we have is that there is poor choice available and no local school. The solution is an emptybuilding up there.

If you had to send your child to an existing school, where would you send him?

We wouldn’t mind sending him to any of the primary schools in the area – Belleville, Highview or Honeywell.90% of the kids that go there achieve the average, Level 4 and above by the end of school. There are lots of good secondary schools in the area – we’re just far away from them and they are over-subscribed. It’d also depend on what he’s good at. I hope my son ends up at the Bolingbroke school we’re campaigning for.

What stage is the campaign at now?

At October 2010, the NSC and ARK Schools are preparing to consult with the local community to get feedback to the school during November/December. In addition they are preparing the formal Business Case to be submitted to the DfE. Currently the NSC is asking any supporters of the school to contact Wandsworth Council to confirm they do not wish to see the NHS build flats on the site of the former Bolingbroke Hospital. The closing date for comments to the council on the NHS resi planning application is 28th October.

Read more about the debate over the Bolingbroke Academy here. Architects Studio Octopi mocked up pictures of the Bolingbroke Academy.