Swamped with students (From Oxford Mail)

Swamped with students

5:00pm Thursday 10th May 2012 in Letters

YOU reported (last Thursday’s Oxford Mail) that the company behind a planned language academy says it will pump millions of pounds into the city’s economy.

Anna Ireland’s claim that the academy which EF plans to create at Cotuit Hall, Headington will pump £12m in the city’s economy highlights the sheer scale of the development they have in mind.

This is comparable with the turnover of some of our existing private schools.

For local residents the creation of another private school in Oxford, in what was previously a dormitory for 110 Oxford Brookes students, means an extra 408 16 to 18-year-olds will be living in the local community – 300 of them living and studying on site, with a further 100 living with host families in the local community.

But to understand EF’s impact on Headington you have to add a further 750 language students that EF have already recruited into the redeveloped Plater College less than half-a-mile away from Cotuit Hall.

Even in its heyday Plater had a maximum of 150 students, so this site alone has a 500 per cent increase. In other words, by the time they have redeveloped Cotuit, the EF group will have 1,150 students in the centre of the Headington Hill conservation area.

As our two universities feel the pressure to lower student impact in Oxford, EF continues to drown us in yet more student occupation. This begs the question: who is regulating EF?

ROGER EVANS Jack Straws Lane Headington Oxford

Comments are closed on this article.