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When Cornwall Council's ruling cabinet meets on Wednesday to consider proposals for building a £2.3million new school in St Tudy, councillors will note a 13-page report which, while recommending a feasibility study for the project, details 58 paragraphs of analysis which mostly argue the case for NOT building it.

Among these is the observation that £1.7million of the cost could be realised by reallocating capital funds which had been earmarked for building a new nursery and infant school at Torpoint.

The report states that such a move would pose an "extreme risk" to the possibility that Torpoint would get a new school, "due to future reductions of government funding." When the council realised that ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Cornwall was planning to run a story about this, it rushed out a statement to Torpoint parents promising that they "remain the council's next priority......as and when suficient funding is received, which is dependent on the new government's spending review." (ie - forget it.)

Torpoint's £1.7million on its own is insufficient to build a new school and might be lost at the end of the financial year unless it is spent on an alternative project, possibly St Tudy.

The really strange thing is that no-one seems to have asked Torpoint's school governors what they thought. Not only were they not consulted about the Cabinet report which names their school and expresses concern about its apparent loss of funding, they seem at best lukewarm about having a new school anyway. The existing premises, they say, are perfectly adequate; Ofsted raised no concerns; and the children are happy, healthy and flourishing. Education, say the governors, is about teaching, not bricks and mortar.

When I asked one governor if Torpoint really needed a new school she answered simply: "No." Asked if the money should be spent in St Tudy instead, she said: "Good idea."

Torpoint's governors and Cornwall Council (and its predecessor, Cornwall county council) are supposed to have been talking about a new school for more than four years. If county hall knew what the Torpoint governors were thinking, might this £1.7million have been put to better use some time ago?