A new school for Cotham!

The third and final of the big issues that have been occupying my time of late has been the exciting and very welcome plan to create a new primary school on the site of Redland Police Station in Cotham.

This has been in the air as a possibility for some time. It's been known that the Police had come to consider the station as too large and out-of-date for their purposes. At the same time, the Council was looking for potential sites for new primary provision in the Redland/Cotham area to meet growing demand from families - to avoid a recurrence of the mess left by Labour in 2009 when 300 families were left without places for their children.

Just before Christmas, the Cabinet approved a proposal from St John's Primary School to run an extension on the Police Station site from September 2012, provided that the land deal progresses. It looks like it is doing so and I understand that it is expected that the Police will move out at the end of February. They will be temporarily based at Southmead, but the neighbourhood team will be returning to the area as soon as a suitable site can be found for them.

Given that it is intended for the new school to open in September 2012, things are now moving on very quickly. As the Council's contracted school builder, Skanska are leading the project and are currently consulting with local residents about how the school might look and work. The first consultation session was last week, but there is another being held this coming Thursday (26th January) at the Friends Meeting House on Hampton Road between 2.30pm and 3.30pm and from 6.30pm to 7.30pm. As I understand it, this is an 'open door' event, so please come along if you want to find out more.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no great fan of Skanska due to their actions during the Cotham School building works. They repeatedly acted in some very questionable ways, especially in terms of working within planning law and responding to the local community, most notably through the felling of four large and beautiful trees on Cotham Road. As far as I am concerned, they have a lot of ground to make up with this new project and I will be watching them like a hawk. I'm obviously delighted to see new primary provision locally, but not at any cost and not half-cocked.

A particular challenge for the new school will be the traffic management and associated road safety issues. Lower Redland Road is narrow and heavily parked. It is not an ideal location for parents to be dropping off their children by car and significant effort is going to be needed by all concerned to promote walking and cycling as the primary means of getting there. As I reported some months ago, there are already plans to improve safety at the junction of Lower Redland Road and Elgin Park and the school needs will now also have to be worked into this.