The long-running saga of the new primary school to combine the voluntary aided St Mary’s Infants and St Peter’s Juniors into one building has at last got a timeline for completion. The government have confirmed the money has been found, but the building will not start for a while.
The target date for the opening of the new school is the start of the school year in September 2016. Although the money has been found, the Department for Education and its agencies will not start talking again to Wiltshire Council about the plans for the school until November 2014.
That in turn means building work cannot begin until Spring 2015. The site for the new school is known as Van Diemens Land – lying east of the existing St Mary’s infant school and south the police station and north of Isbury Road.
In 2011 four acres of this land was earmarked by Wiltshire Council as one of 27 possible Marlborough area development sites needed to meet the county’s strategic housing target.
It was said to be available for a 51 home development between 2017 and 2021. In the end the much larger, green field site west of the Salisbury Road was chosen.
The new school will accommodate 420 pupils. Projections by Wiltshire Council’s education officers – even with the planned new housing in the town – estimate that the number of pupils will not reach that figure by 2020.
There are still quite a lot of unknowns to be settled. There’s the question of ownership. St Mary’s school building is owned by the Diocese. The land on which it is built is leased to the Diocese. The much larger plot of land behind it, on which the new school will be built, is owned by Wiltshire Council. Who will own the new school?
If the Governors of the two schools decide the new school will be an academy, ownership will have to be negotiated.
The Council bought the land for the new school about fifteen years ago and planning permission was granted in 2012. Then the last government’s Primary Capital Programme was halted by the incoming coalition government.
The plans still exist – right down to fixtures and fittings – but may have to be altered to meet the coalition government’s rules that atriums and curves can play no part in new school buildings.
The space provision agreed under the previous funding scheme may be too generous for current regulations. The coalition government has ordered schools to be 15 per cent smaller than those built under the previous government. Standardised designs are now being used.
There is also the issue of the provision for special educational needs pupils which was not covered by the original cost estimate. In the year 2012-2013 the two schools catered for 20 pupils with special educational needs.
One good thing is that the new school will be built with capital money and not under a public finance initiative (PFI) contract or even under the government’s new version of PFI known as PF2.
It is thought strange that the government did not consider this school more of a priority. And it appears there was no political push to make it a priority.
St Peter’s (formerly the town’s grammar school) was built in 1904 and is Grade II listed. It has been judged as “completely inaccessible for physically impaired pupils”. Over half the classrooms and the school hall are upstairs.
Recently a chair-bound pupil who should have gone to St Peter’s had to be sent to another and less appropriate school.
Wiltshire Council investigated the installation of a lift. The cost was estimated to be about £150,000 and it was then found that the scheme was “unlikely” to get listed building planning consent.
Recently its wiring was judged to need complete replacement. In the hope that the new school would be ready sooner than now planned, short-term work had to be done to make the wiring safe.
St Peter’s has no playing field or grassed area.
St Mary’s was built in 1974. Its buildings are considered to be “not ideal” but are not in poor condition like those at St Peter’s – they do include some temporary buildings.
Wiltshire Councillor Richard Gamble, portfolio holder for schools, skills and youth, told Marlborough News Online that the new primary school would be “a great boost” for education in Marlborough – and he emphasised that both the present schools provide excellent educational standards.
