AN ANGRY St Thomas's councillor has blasted plans for a £200m shake-up for Dudley schools claiming town centre schools are being excluded.

Dudley schools are set to be transformed with Pensnett High School set to be bulldozed and merge with The Crestwood School in Kingswinford.

Pensnett pupils will transfer to The Crestwood's Bromley Lane site to form one of the academies.

Holly Hall Mathematics and Computing College will be replaced by an academy on its existing Scotts Green Close site.

Now cllr Shaukat Ali claims Dudley town centre schools such as Castle High have been neglected and missing out on the exciting scheme.

The multi-million pound proposals are currently out for public consultation with Dudley set to be included in the 2010 round of new schools forming part of the government's Building Schools for the Future project.

He said: "We need to make the most of this. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to do this.

"I'm not against the Holly Hall academy idea. But what about the schools that are left behind? "We've not got any included in Dudley town centre. A large number of St Thomas's kids go to Castle High, what about Castle High?

"We should be thinking outside the box to transform education, the schools most in need of improvement. A lot of Dudley students go to King Edwards and have to take a daily bus trip. We need facilities locally.

"We feel the proposals out for consultation at the moment are not creative, innovative or ambitious."

But these claims have been rebuffed by council education chiefs who say Castle High School, visited by Tory leader David Cameron last week, is the next to be considered as an academy.

Cllr Liz Walker, cabinet member for children's services, said: "We are looking at Castle High becoming an academy, those plans are in the pipeline.

"If we support Castle High School to achieve better results that is good. At the moment the results are below the floor but that does not take away the good work by the staff and pupils there, there is a good quality of education."

She added there are currently no plans to close any borough primary schools and statistics revealed the borough birth rate was on the up.