The latest venture for a successful businessman? His own school

Jon De Maria, a self-employed business man, is one of hundreds of parents applying to set up his own school. Today, the government published the forms that parents, charities, teachers and others must fill in to do this. De Maria, together with 3,000 other parents, is intent on creating a new school near his home in Battersea, south London. He says when children come out of one of the three primary schools in his neighbourhood, they go to 49 different secondary schools, none of which are local. Today, he is visiting possible sites for the new school, which he hopes will eventually take 650 pupils aged 11 to 16, with an extra 150 in the sixth form. A derelict hospital and an empty school building are two possibilities. The new schools will be run as academies – state-funded but independent of local authority control. He has already found a charity – international children's charity ARK – to run the school. ARK already has a network of academies. His school will be non-selective, inclusive, secular, but strongly academic, he says. While he lives in a middle class area, he says he wants the school to be for everyone. "This education policy will give us half a chance to send our kids to a school in their community," he says. "We want it to be a strongly academic school that engages children, but makes them self-reliant too. We live in a shrinking world and these kids are going to have the kinds of jobs that we don't even know about now. We need to educate them for that." De Maria has a two-year-old son, but he hopes the new school will be open well before he starts secondary school. He wants at least a temporary site to be up and running by September 2011.