Blackburn primary school granted £700,000 expansion (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Blackburn primary school granted £700,000 expansion

1:53pm Tuesday 14th August 2012 in News

A POPULAR primary school has been granted a £700,000 expansion to accommodate the demand for places.

Plans for the improvements at St Barnabas with St Paul’s School in Wensley Fold, Blackburn, will allow the number of pupils to double at the Oakenhurst Road school by 50 per cent from 280 to 420 by 2020.

Blackburn with Darwen council’s cabinet agreed to authorise the spending from reserves to start work, allowing the first larger intake of 60 pupils can be enrolled in September 2013.

This will enable the school to have two reception classes of children in the same year group and slowly end the current mixed age class structure used with the current 40 new pupils each September.

Executive board members will be told a review of school places across the borough because of increasing birth rates identified Wensley Fold as a major pressure point.

Wensley Fold councillor and Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council leader Kate Hollern said: “It is a very popular school and a popular area for people to live.”

And that is why, she said, she backed the initiative to expand the school’s places Coun Tony Humphrys is the council’s executive member for schools.

Coun Humphreys said: “We need to increase the capacity of schools in areas we know there is a growth in the population.”

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