Join Our Mailing List
To receive regular updates on the progress of our campaign, join our Google group. Simply enter your email address below:The Middle School is the wrong location for the town's only community primary school
The Middle School buildings are not appropriate for children as young as four. They were originally built to provide a secondary school. New buildings would be required at a cost of at least £9million.
The Middle School site is in Herston, on the farthest edge of Swanage and currently served by St Mark's school. A new primary would mean the families of the 140 children currently at Swanage First School transporting children as young as four to and from school daily, probably by car from the town centre where most of our families live.
The Mount Scar site was once a primary school and it can easily accommodate the additional two years again.
The Purbeck Review body does not deny this. The Proposal suggests that St Mary's RC School will be given the option to take over our site:
The existing site [St Mary's] would be cramped in order to provide for a primary school and therefore an alternative site would be recommended. This could be the vacated Swanage First School site.
From this statement it appears that our school is to close not because our own site is unsuitable for use as a Primary School but because the Purbeck Review body believes that the St Mark's and St Mary's sites are not suitable. Whether the schools themselves agree that their sites are unsuitable is not yet clear.