Pupils queuing up for places at free school

Batley Grammar School is bidding to become one of the first free schools in the region under the Government's education reforms which aim to encourage parents and teachers to set up their own state-funded schools.

The majority of free schools are being set up from scratch by parents' groups who are unhappy with the choice of local council-run primaries or secondaries in their area.

Batley Grammar, however, aims to become one of the first private schools in the country to join the programme by converting to free school status next year.

Headteacher Brigid Tullie told the Yorkshire Post that as part of its bid it had received expressions of interest from 1,200 parents, including almost all of those whose children currently attend the school.

It has around 350 pupils on its roll but numbers have begun increasing since it announced plans to become state-funded from September 2011.

Mrs Tullie said: "We are operating below the building's capacity. Going back to 1989 there was more than 600 pupils and we will aim to get back to that as a free school.

"This will be a gradual increase and we will start from the bottom up. We plan to go from being a two-form entry school to three form. We offer a limited number of courses at sixth form and expanding will allow us to increase this."

Mrs Tullie said she did not expect teachers' salaries or conditions to change greatly as a result of the transfer to free school status.

It is one of 25 free school proposals across the country which have now been approved by the Department for Education to develop a business case.

The free school policy being rolled out by the coalition Government is modelled on the Swedish education system.

Mrs Tullie said the school had decided to explore becoming part of the state system as it was aware that paying for tuition fees was an issue for some of its parents. If it gets the go-ahead from Ministers it will remain a "through school" serving pupils from the age of three to 18.

Mrs Tullie said: "This allows us to avoid the dip you see during the transitional phase when pupils move schools. We are working on our admissions policy now but we are already a very good model for a multi-cultural, socially diverse school."

The school plans to use the fair banding system which will see prospective students sitting a test and then a representative number from different ability levels being accepted.

Although Batley has been an independent school for more than 30 years, it has spent most of its life as a state school.

It is one of four proposals for free schools in Yorkshire which have been given the green light to develop further.

The King's Science Academy, in Bradford, is being planned by teacher Sajid Hussain to provide up to 500 places in the city. It was the first in the region to be accepted onto the programme by the Government in September.

Earlier this month three more Yorkshire free schools won initial backing from the Department for Education: Batley Grammar School, The Birkenshaw, Birstall and Gomersal Parents Alliance (BBGPA) and a project called the Rainbow School in Bradford.

The BBGPA has been campaigning for its own free school since before the General Election and was hailed as a blueprint for how the policy should work when David Cameron and Michael Gove attended its rally during the election trail.

The parents group was formed in an attempt to save Birkenshaw Middle School from closure and now aims to operate its own secondary school from the same site from 2012. However Birkenshaw Middle School is not scheduled to close until at least the following year.

BBGPA member Lesley Surman said the group aimed to hold talks with Kirklees Council about whether two schools could operate from the same site during the last year of the middle school's life.

Kirklees Council had planned to close Birkenshaw Middle School down as part of its Building School for the Future plans but the authority lost funding for this during the summer, when the Government pulled the plug on the 55bn schools improvement scheme, and campaigners are now not clear as to when the site may become available.

The Rainbow School project in Bradford aims to open a primary school in the city – based in either the Great Horton or Leeds Road area, by next year. It is being led by ATL Yorkshire, a Bradford based not-for-profit business and enterprise support organisation.

Ayub Ismail, one of the co-founders of the Rainbow Schools Group said it aimed to develop a credible track record for raising standards in Bradford before looking to set up more primaries elsewhere in the country.

It has collected a petition with more than 230 signatures from parents and 170 from young people in the city supporting their plan.

Founded in 17th century

Batley Grammar School was founded in 1612 by the Rev William Lee.

The original school

building was built close to the Parish Church of Batley, and the duties of the

Master were "to teach and instruct youth and children" and to make them

"capable and fit for the university."

The school moved to its present site in 1878, and for the next 100 years was reliant on income from the West Riding County

Council, and then Kirklees Council.

It became an independent fee-paying school in 1978.

In 1988 girls were admitted for the first time into the Batley Grammar School's sixth form, and it became fully co-educational in 1996.