Alderley Edge girls school up for sale

I don’t usually stick my oar in on items like this, but this latest school closure is nothing short of social vandalism. It’s policy dressed up as necessity, delivered by a government that seems more interested in pulling levers for spite than actually supporting the communities it claims to represent.

Local schools are already buckling, yet they are expected to absorb a sudden influx of pupils who weren’t previously using state resources. It’s hard to read that as anything other than disregard, if not outright hostility towards places like Alderley Edge. The message feels clear: communities are collateral damage.

What’s being destroyed isn’t just a school, it’s centuries of tradition, identity, and continuity. Once that heritage is gone, it’s gone for good. And for a party that insists it’s on the side of working people, the outcome looks suspiciously like the opposite: a slow, deliberate drift toward a more elitist landscape, where opportunity narrows and traditional culture is treated as expendable.

The rhetoric says “fairness.” The reality feels like demolition.

Alternatively, attendance has been falling for years, even before the merger that created it in 1999. The most interesting political angle on this is that one of its few notable alumni is Charlotte Owen, the unlikely Baroness.

To Steve. AEGS which exists due to numbers being down at two previous schools which merged said numbers had been down year on year. You might lose a few due to VAT but it’s not the reason for it’s closure.

Wilmslow High is currently exceeding its maximum capacity by over 10% and has over 2,500 kids…. surely it’s common sense for the Council / DfE to purchase the site and operate it as an orbital school for WHS, especially given the additional couple of thousand homes that will be allocated and built in and around Wilmslow as part of the next LP Review? But then again, when does common sense ever come in to these things.

Expect to see more of this considering the birth rate is well below replacement level, with net migration now very low. Schools closing all over the place (which they are, mostly due to a lack of pupils) is the canary in the coalmine for a disaster in years to come when there’s not enough working age people to fund all the pensioners. An issue the current generation of retirees care little or nothing about.

@Steve5839 Taxing the private schools is fair as they’re businesses after all, Why should they get their social and life advantages tax free?
Also that policy wasn’t the reason this place failed, not all businesses do well.
I do agree though state schools need more funding in general.

Any estimates of the market price for each site and both sites combined?

@Tomo, what do you believe the reason is for the closure? Are you sure some drop in enrolment is due to VAT? I thought the school absorbed VAT into their fees…And if they did, then a drop in enrolment would reflect a demand problem for a market as a whole or a demand problem for this school in particular. Unless other non-tuition fee costs went up for the students due to VAT and that deterred further enrolment, which I doubt.

Population decline is spot on. Falling birth rate and a massive reduction in immigration will lead to even more schools closing and a fall in young people to work and pay taxes. It is indeed a ticking time bomb.

This is certainly not the fault of government policy . It is set up as a business and should pay the appropriate tax contributions. If it’s not good enough or clever enough to run a successful private school in an area with much demand for private education it is clearly not in fact good enough or to focused on profitability ; hence putting itself up for sale as real estate . Consistent with its previous actions of selling sites in other parts of the village and combining for business reasons . Not a good recent history compared with other local private and state schools .

I struggle with the assertion that taxing education or children’s afterschool clubs is fair as do the majority of countries around the world. Rachel Reeves and this Labour government is a disaster… providing increased benefits for the few and doing everything they can to make all hard working families poorer and increasing the social divide. Only 4 more years to go.

Whilst government policy and socioeconomic factors are unhelpful.. the closure of AESG falls solely with the Board of Governors (what remains) and the Headteacher. Over the past two years this group have had one agenda – close the school. If these individuals had been part of a business (as opposed to a charity) they would be long gone. From the outside it looked like they have forced governors out – not declared conflict of interest and worst of all failed to accept help when they were outside their areas of expertise. Sadly it is pupils and staff that bear the brunt of this mis management. I hope one day these board of governors and head teachers will apologise and in the meantime the charity commission investigate fully.

Steve is Reform-curious.

Very sad. But there is a lot of politics involved in the decision. This is not the first and won’t be the last Hope some thought goes in to what replaces it.

Can we stop letting through obviously AI replies? Steve’s comment at 12:43 is clearly copy and pasted from ChatGPT and surely just intended to rile up the comments.

Your frustration has been noted. We are working on improving the comment system.

June 04, 2026 at 9:43 am

By Julia Hatmaker

Can people on here be respectful of viewpoint diversity? Thanks

As a note, our comment policy does not permit personal attacks. Please keep this in mind when writing your comments.

I am pleased there is an appetite for debate, and both sides of the argument have aired their views, some of which I agree with and some I don’t, that is the curious nature of debate.
However, I have learnt a lot about the area which this story was framed around.

Fine, re. personal ‘attacks’, but if you can remove those before they hit the screens, you can remove obvious AI slop.

Hi Northern Monkey – feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] to discuss our comment moderation.

June 04, 2026 at 1:07 pm

By Julia Hatmaker

I agree the school has been on a downward spiral for years, but the introduction of VAT on school fees has been the proverbial straw that broke the camels back.. lets no pretend the VAT on school fees was purely the politics of envy rather than for any economic benefit !!

The handling of this whole process by the School and its Board of Governors has been at best shambolic. Notwithstanding the well documented challenges within the sector (VAT, pupil numbers etc) – its leadership team have been complicit in the schools closure and have ignored the opportunity for involvement from the wider school community to save the school. Schooling shouldn’t be a one size fits all – unfortunately the Governments’ policy is very much driving this outcome

Who owns the site? Who gets the money.

A large number of the AESG s pupils have gone to King’s Macclesfield a few miles away if you research alderley edge say on you tube or rightmove you will realise that it’s not a money issue

Interesting that if Labour achieved its ambition to rejoin the EU, it would not be allowed to apply VAT to education. So rapid application will close as many as possible before rejoining/removal of Labour.

Chris – Unfortunately Labour doesn’t have a policy to rejoin the EU, I wish they did.

Alderley edge primary school sits in the middle of these two sites why not have a secondary school on the mount carmel plot and sell the other plot on lydiat lane to fund it easing the pressure on the wilmslow school