NEW SCHOOLS FOR NORTH WICKLOW
FOUR new schools will be built in County Wicklow over the next four years, the Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton, announced last week.
The announcement came following demographic exercises carried out by the Department into the current and future need for primary and post-primary school places and will be among 42 new schools built nationwide in that period.
Two new secondary schools, accommodating 1,400 students are in the pipeline: one in Wicklow town for up to 600 students and another in Kilcoole/Greystones, which will accommodate 800 students.
The Wicklow secondary school is expected to open next year, while the north Wicklow school has a opening date of 2021.
Two new primary schools will also be built.
Newtownmountkennedy, one of Ireland’s fastest growing towns according to the last Census, is to get a new eight-classroom school which is expected to open in 2019.
There’s good news too for the Woodbrook/Shanganagh area of Bray, which is due to have an eight-classroom school open in 2021.
A process will be run to establish parental preference for the patronage of each individual school and a key determinant of the successful patron will be the preferences of parents of pre-school children in that area. The patronage process for the schools due to open in 2019 is expected to take place this year.
Speaking at Friday’s announcement, Minister Bruton said: ‘If we want to be the best in Europe, we need to make sure that we are planning for future need and providing state of the art facilities for future generations. I am announcing these 26 new primary schools and 16 new post-primary schools today which, together with largescale projects such as school extensions and projects under the Additional Accommodation Scheme, will serve to meet education needs over the next four years across the country.’
‘Since 2011, we have created 122,000 new and replacement school places. We are now creating more school places than at any other period in the history of the State. In 2010, some 9,000 school places were created. In 2017, we built approximately 18,800,’ said the Minister.