Major update on new Preston secondary school plans

Lancashire County Council’s cabinet will be asked to decide between land off Maxy Lane in Higher Bartle and the former site of Tulketh High School in Ingol.

It will bring to an end the long-running saga over the location of the facility, which is required as a result of the development of 5,500 new homes in the North West Preston area.

The Reform-controlled authority’s cabinet member for education and skills, Matthew Salter, told a full council meeting on Thursday that education bosses were “very comfortable” that the need for school places could be met in time – provided the choice of site is ultimately made at the cabinet gathering on 4th September.

Nevertheless, that will be almost six months after the deadline the previous Conservative administration – which lost control of the county council in May – set for the decision in order to enable the four-form entry school to be open by the target date of September 2027.

Before the Tories left office, they had already indicated a contingency plan may be needed if that timeline slipped – and County Cllr Salter reported to a cabinet meeting last week that the new facility might not be needed until September 2028 if “temporary works” were carried out at other secondary schools in the vicinity “to manage demand for places”.

While the Tories had identified the Higher Bartle site as their preferred option, County Cllr Salter said that neither location was “entirely suitable or ideal”.

At Maxy Lane, there were concerns about “a lack of essential infrastructure, drainage and general site suitability”, while the old Tulketh High plot, on Tag Lane, suffered from transport “constraints”, he explained.

The Maxy Lane site is also still not in the county council’s control, in spite of having been reserved for a secondary school since January 2022, when planning permission was granted for it within a yet-to-be-built estate of 320 homes.

The meeting also heard that the bill for the school would be “in the region of £30m-£40m”, with the Higher Bartle option – which lies between Sandy Lane and Tabley Lane – likely to be the more expensive of the two. The authority will need to borrow the money to fund the project as any available government cash has already been earmarked for a new primary school and spent on other school place projects.

County Cllr Salter told the full council that cabinet would consider the matter “soberly [and] carefully” – and that the decision could not have been reached sooner because of a lack of information.

He was responding to a question from Liberal Democrat Preston North representative Fiona Duke who said that the delay to date had made the matter “a critical issue now for parents and children in North West Preston”.

‘Give us what we were promised’

Meanwhile, her party colleague on Preston City Council, Ben Ward – who represents Ingol and Cottam – has set up an e-petition on the county council’s website, pushing for the Higher Bartle site to be chosen.

It states: “The North and West of Preston have experienced massive house building over the past decade with further sizeable projects planned for the next decade.

“New residents invested in the vision laid out [for the area] with the expectation that the promised services would follow.

“The alternative site being considered at Tulketh isn’t appropriate. For the majority of the new homes which have been built, this location is not walkable.

“Locating the school on Tag Lane, an already busy artery road, would create significant congestion issues, combining with ‘school run’ traffic to two other local secondaries in the close proximity.”

Lancashire County Council carried out a public consultation more than two years ago on building a new school on the former Tulketh High site – which closed in 2008, by which point it was known as Tulketh Community Sports College – but received negative feedback on the proposal.

It lies outside the North West Preston Masterplan area, where a new secondary school had been promised as part of the major housing development taking place there across the two decades to the mid-2030s.

However, the authority began leaning towards the Ingol plot because of the delays in realising the Higher Bartle site. But by last autumn, it had put the latter back on the table – and has since been keeping its options open between the two.

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