PARENTS at Haxby have formed an action group to campaign to keep their children's school open.

A group of parents at Oaken Grove Primary School have got together after the City of York Council revealed a proposal to close the school last month.

The plan was put forward as a way of tackling the growing number of empty school places in the Haxby and Wigginton area, which has an ageing population.

Michael Peters, education director, has written to parents saying they would be consulted in the autumn term after further council discussions and apologising for the way they found out about the plans through the Evening Press. He said no decisions had been made.

But parent Collette Eales said she feared that parents would be the last to find out about the details of any proposals.

"We are not prepared to allow the machinery of local government to roll over us and will fight this proposal every step of the way," she said. "We have a wonderful community school where every child is known by name, where teachers know the families, where parents raise very large sums of money to support the school and spend many hours helping in the school."

She also called on education chiefs to answer questions asked at a parents' meeting about the situation and asked why the plans, which had been part of a School Organisation Plan, had not been put on the council web site.

Chris Edwards, deputy education director, said the questions she referred to had been answered by Mr Peters at the meeting.

He said the rest of the School Organisation Plan was due to go on to the website soon, but the Haxby, Wigginton and Clifton schools section would not be included as it had been taken out for more discussion over the summer.

He said: "We've always said throughout the process that Oaken Grove is a good school. It's just been through an Ofsted inspection and I suspect the report will say it is a good school, well-led, well-managed, with good teachers, effective provision for children and good standards.

"That doesn't alter the fact that we have an issue in Haxby and Wigginton in terms of provision, which we need to resolve."