The government has formally approved the closure of Oasis Academy Putney on Putney Lower Common. The school will shut down this summer after plans to close it were first announced in February.
The decision, which is revealed in papers published for the Wandsworth Schools Forum, comes amid concern for what will happen to the new building, on the site of the former Putney Hospital, where an NHS redevelopment collapsed and an easement was later found by the Charity Commission to have probably been sold for half its true value.
Government approval means the closure is now legally settled, not just planned.
Why this site’s future is complicated
After that redevelopment collapsed, Wandsworth bought the hospital site freehold from the NHS for £4.45 million in 2011. The school’s only access runs across land owned by the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservators, the charity that manages the common, under an easement Wandsworth bought in 2014 for £350,000.
Oasis had its own plan for the building. In November 2025, its chief executive wrote to Wandsworth’s director of education proposing to keep running the site as an “Oasis Village”: a hub for children struggling with or excluded from mainstream education, bringing together charities, food banks and statutory services under one roof, similar to a project Oasis already runs in Tulse Hill. Wandsworth’s director replied that she was open to exploring it, and the two organisations met in January 2026.
That plan always ran into the easement’s terms. The 2014 deed ties the access road to the site being used as “a school substantially providing education free at the point of delivery.” An Oasis Village, by design, is for children not in mainstream education, and the access right lapses once the school itself closes this summer. With the closure now confirmed, that lapse is no longer a future risk but a near-certainty, and the Village proposal looks dead in its current form. When Oasis told Putney.news in May that decisions about the building’s future sat with the council, it did not mention its own Village proposal.
A Charity Commission statutory inquiry gave the fuller picture on that easement: retrospective valuations put its worth at £675,000 to £950,000, more than double what Wandsworth paid, and found governance failings at the charity. The Commons Conservators’ board has changed completely since then, with a new chair in place since 2024.
Part of a wider pattern
The council’s paper places Oasis alongside four other Wandsworth primaries that have closed since 2023 for the same reason: falling pupil numbers across the borough. It is not a school singled out for closure, but part of a wider pattern of closures.
What happens next
Families still weighing their options can find our guidance on transferring schools, covering the application process and support for children with additional needs.
At an April hustings, a Green Party candidate raised the case of The Scrubbery, a community charity using space in the building, after visiting and hearing its request to stay on as a caretaker once the school closes. Two days later, at a hustings in Roehampton, a Labour candidate said the council was “committed to keeping that building for educational purposes.”
We later revealed the council was, by then, four months into undisclosed talks with Oasis about a non-educational use. Oasis has since said the building belongs to Wandsworth Council and that decisions about its future rest with the local authority once the school closes.
