The long delayed building of a new primary school to house both St Peter’s Junior and St Mary’s Infant schools, has been delayed again – but this time only by a matter of months.
The merger of the two schools was approved in December last year and the new combined primary school was scheduled to open on 1 September 2016. That target date for the opening was set in September 2013.
The new primary school will now open in April 2017 on the site to the east of St Mary’s Infant school on what is known as Van Diemans Land.
There has been some delay as finance for the building shifted when it changed from being a Wiltshire Council project to one receiving government funds through the Priority Schools Building Programme run by the Department of Education’s Education Funding Agency.
The good news is that Wiltshire Council is adding £466,000 towards the total cost of the project so the school can be single-storey and provide space for pupils with additional needs.
Work on the new 440-pupil primary school is due to begin next spring. The school will be two form entry for 420 pupils with facilities for a further 20 pupils with additional needs.
Representatives from the governing bodies of both St Mary’s Infants and St Peter’s Junior Schools have formed a temporary governing body to oversee the project. The next step is expected to be an application for planning permission and new consultations with neighbouring households will be necessary a the design will almost certainly not be the same as the 2010 plans.
The new school was due to be built under the last Labour government’s Building Schools for the Future programme, which was scrapped by Michael Gove in July 2010. Then Marlborough was not made a priority in the coalition government’s new Priority School Building Programme and missed out on the first round of financing.
The planning permission for Marlborough’s new primary school that was approved in 2010 has now lapsed – and anyway the Department of Education has since changed the regulations about new school buildings.
The plans approved by Wiltshire Council on 1 July 2010 carried conditions – some of these were normal ones, but one in particular was quite unusual.
The conditions stated that no development could start “within the application site until: a) A written programme of archaeological investigation, which should include on-site work and off-site work such as the analysis, publishing and archiving of the results, has been submitted and approved by the Local Planning Authority; and b) The approved programme of archaeological work has been carried out in accordance with the approved details.”
This condition was made because when an earlier attempt to build the school on that site was begun in 1997 there had been an archaeological evaluation: “Eleven trenches were excavated five of which contained archaeological features relating to the early Neolithic or Early Bronze Age.”
The part of the site holding these finds was the area where landscaping work would have been undertaken to ‘establish a playing field with a suitable gradient’.
It is not yet clear how long any further archaeological investigation of the site would take, but it could involve little more observation by an archaeologist as mechanical diggers strip the topsoil.
Other parts of the 2012 planning application reveal some interesting points:
• a few bats were using the roof space of the existing school building
• several changes to the plans were made to lessen the impact of the new building on neighbouring houses in George Lane
• the pavement between George Lane and the school entrance was to be widened – in part by narrowing the lower section of Ducks Meadow.
The 2010 plans increased the parking spaces then existing at St Mary’s from 14 to 47 for the combined school and included 40 covered bicycle spaces.