A COMMUNITY campaign has been launched to oppose proposals to make Tavistock College a trust school. The Campaign to Keep Tavistock College as a Community School has been set up by parents, grandparents, former school governors and educational professionals who are not convinced by the educational case for converting the community comprehensive into a trust school. It follows a secret ballot of staff at the college where 140 were against the changes and 12 in favour. Parent Margaret Quinn said: ?The college has failed to show how the quality of teaching and learning will be improved by ending its status as a community school and putting the land and buildings under a trust which is not accountable to local people.? The group has produced a draft briefing paper for parents, governors and members of the public, balancing what it described as the ?biased and misleading information? distributed by the college. Unions, including the NUT, who organised the ballot at the college, are opposed to the proposal, fearing it would lead to privatisation of education ? they are against the school setting up its own admission policy and fear staff pay and conditions would be affected. Former governor and member of the campaign group Andrew Thompson said this week: ?Bearing in mind that staff overwhelmingly rejected the proposals, there is no reason to believe that the public would not have the same view. ?A lot more people are opposed to it than have been able to express and a lot of people are simply confused because of the lack of clarity in the proposals.? Mr Thompson said an independently verified ballot of parents should be held with information given to them for and against the proposals so people could make up their own minds. College principal Colin Eves said last week he was surprised by the ballot result as earlier consultation with parents and staff had showed two thirds favoured the trust bid. A trust school would see a new board of governors appointed and staff employed by the governing body not the LEA. He said statutory proposals would now be published and under the defined consultation process there was a requirement to give feedback with observations received so far. ?It will include all the points that were made at the first stage of consultation where people had reservations,? he said. He said the governors would make a decision following this second stage of the consultation.