St Joseph's College may shut under plans being considered

Education bosses outlined the �200m proposals to hundreds of parents at a meeting on Monday.

The city's 17 high schools would be shut and replaced with 12 new schools.

Roisin Maguire, head of St Joseph's College in Trent Vale, said: "We think it's very indiscriminate to close all of the schools and start again."

The proposals have gone out to public consultation.

Private firm Serco, which was brought in to run children's services in Stoke-on-Trent, put together the plan on behalf of the city council.

The proposals are not expected to lead to redundancies. But most secondary teachers would have to re-apply for jobs.

St Joseph's is one of the sites which could close and be replaced by a new school.

'High achieving'

But Ms Maguire said the authority should look at schools individually.

"I think St Joseph's should stay because it's a high-performing school - not just academically but right across everything - sporting, creative and so on," she said.

"If we had any other authority, the authority would be celebrating us as a high-achieving school.

"We can't fathom why this authority would want to damage what we are."

She said if the school closed down, its trustees would have to apply to the Diocese of Birmingham to reopen it as a Catholic school, she said.

She added: "My job would be up for national advert and we just can't understand that."

Ginette Clements was among parents at the school who said they were unhappy at the plans and felt their children's education would be affected by the upheaval.

"I'm not happy at all. I do understand where they are coming from and they want to make it good across the board, but at what cost?" she said.

Elected mayor Mark Meredith has called the plans a "golden opportunity" to improve education in the city, where many of the schools are not performing well.

The council said it needed fewer schools because secondary school pupil numbers were projected to fall to 12,500 in 2015, compared with 14,500 in 2002.