A COUNCIL has been urged to build an extra secondary school to match the thousands of family homes being built in a borough.

Conservative regeneration spokesman Cllr Paul Marrow told Blackburn with Darwen Council's executive board on Thursday there were not enough pupil places to accommodate children from the new houses.

He asked borough education boss Cllr Julie Gunn: "With the current local plan for 9,400 houses (many of which are designed as 3, 4 and 5-bedroom family homes) and further potential housing to be proposed in the draft local plan, what is the current spare capacity of secondary school places in the borough? And what is your department's estimate for future needs?

"Have you any plans to build a new secondary school in the borough to meeting growing pupil numbers?

Cllr Gunn said: "We have no plans to build a new secondary school at the moment.

"The borough has a 13.1 per cent extra capacity across all secondary school year groups in the current academic year.

"A good capacity would be considered to be 10 per cent, however ideally we would like to see a reduction in surplus capacity in Darwen and increased capacity in Blackburn.

"It is forecast that the pressure on secondary school provision will continue for the next two academic intake years.

"However, we are continuing to closely to monitor pupil numbers and are working with colleagues from our growth and development team, as part of the council’s new local plan preparations, to assess our long-term demand for school places, which had previously suggested a long-term shortfall of 1,001 places.

"This revised analysis will be available in early 2022 and will inform the council’s strategic and service planning work."

Cllr Marrow said: "I am gravely concerned.

"It does worry me how we are going to accommodate an extra 1,001 pupils in our current secondaries.

"The council has an ambition of good education for all pupils. Increasing secondary class sizes will not help us achieve that.

"We need a new secondary school or at least extensions building to existing ones.

"When families look at moving to a borough an important thing they look at is the education on offer so we risk having either bigger class sizes or empty homes."