Education £9.3m primary school expansion work to start in weeks
ATRANSFORMED primary school boasting Bristol’s best SATs results is finally preparing for a major expansion.
Builders are due to move in at Perry Court E-Act Academy in Hengrove in the coming weeks, to rebuild and expand the facilities.
They will construct the bigger school on the existing playing fields, and demolish the old building when the new one is ready for pupils to move into.
Skanska announced yesterday that it had been assigned the £9.3m contract.
Its team is due to begin work on site in October and plans to have the school ready by May 2022, ready to serve a huge new 1,400home development planned for Hengrove Park.
Perry Court in Great Hayles Road currently teaches more than 370 pupils, and the expansion will increase its capacity to 630, plus a 45-child nursery.
The Post reported in December how the school had transformed its results and rapidly climbed up the government’s league tables.
The school’s then head teacher admitted it had suffered from a bad reputation in previous years, and spoke of how few parents wanted to send their children there.
In 2017 the school was taken over by the E-Act multi-academy trust, which has helped to guide improvements.
That year it recorded the worst Year 6 SATs results in Bristol, but its 2019 results were the best in the city and 27th-best in the entire country.
Of a cohort of 47 pupils that year, 96 per cent met the expected standard, with all three assessments – reading, writing and maths – ranking ‘well above average’.
Bristol City Council is working with the academy trust on the rebuild project, which will increase capacity from two-form entry to three-form.
This effectively means there would eventually be three separate classes in every year group.
As reported earlier this month, the government and the West of England Combined Authority (Weca) both rejected the council’s bid for £5m each to fund the scheme.
However, Weca said it was working with the city council to deliver alternative funding from a regional pot rather than a national one.
The council budgeted £10m for the scheme when it was first announced, and described the building’s condition as “generally very poor both structurally and externally”.
Perry Court originally expected works to start in September 2019 and finish in March 2021, according to a statement from the then head teacher in 2019.
Planning permission was not granted until December 2019, and the application pencilled in March 2020 as the date of building commencing – just as the coronavirus pandemic hit.
The planning application stated: “The existing school will be without playing fields for the duration of the construction/demolition works.
“It is understood the school intends [to] use the sports pitches of neighbouring schools with whom they have an agreement and will transport pupils to and from.”
As well as the new school buildings, there will also be new car parking, playing fields and sports pitches.