Derby children celebrate opening of new school building
New start for Carlyle Infant and Nursery School thanks to government’s flagship £4.4 billion rebuilding programme.
Pupils and staff at a Derby infant and nursery school have celebrated the official opening of their new building created through the government’s flagship rebuilding programme.
Carlyle Infant and Nursery School is 1 of 7 schools in Derby to be rebuilt through the £4.4 billion priority school building programme (PSBP), which is transforming some of the most run-down schools in the country.
As a result of £2.8 million of construction work, the school’s old buildings have been replaced with a single-storey insulated timber structure, which features modern heating, lighting and ventilation systems to ensure excellent energy efficiency.
To mark the re-opening, a plaque was unveiled and a time capsule buried at the school.
Schools Minister Lord Nash said:
Our investment in school buildings across the country is transforming the learning environment for tens of thousands of pupils and their teachers.
The reopening of Carlyle Infant and Nursery School is a key milestone for the priority school building programme in Derby.
Ensuring all children have access to the best possible schools and facilities is just one part of our commitment to help all young people reach their potential regardless of their background. These buildings will provide modern, fit-for-purpose schools for pupils for many years to come.
Laura Besenzi, Headteacher of Carlyle Infant and Nursery School, said:
As a school, we feel particularly fortunate to access this funding to enable the children and families in Littleover to access a great new building. At Carlyle Infant and Nursery School we are now more able to support our lifelong learners through enabling our community to develop its own learning and engagement together.
We have already spent some time benefiting from this new base and growing in our learning across the community. The school looks forward to sharing the building with the local community through other providers who can gain reward from the government’s scheme of new builds.
John Kirkland, Chairman of Bowmer and Kirkland Limited, said:
This is a great day for the pupils and staff of Carlyle and for the wider community of Derby. This is the second opening of a city school built by us under the priority school building programme for the Education Funding Agency and will help to raise the aspirations of generations of pupils at Carlyle. We have a further 4 schools to complete this year and I am very pleased that Bowmer & Kirkland is part of the PSBP.
Thanks to the PSBP, school buildings are being rebuilt faster and cheaper than those built under the previous school building initiative - Building Schools for the Future (BSF). Under the BSF it took 3 years for construction work to begin. This was slashed to 1 year for the PSBP, with projects costing around a third less. A total of 537 schools will benefit from construction through the 2 phases of the PSBP.
Notes to editors
- The priority school building programme was established in 2011. A total of 260 schools will have their condition needs addressed through the first phase of the programme.
- Thanks to decisions which have been taken to improve efficiency and reduce waste, significant work on those projects is already underway. As of December, 60 schools have opened in new buildings, construction contracts have been signed for 196 schools and the remaining projects are all in the design or planning stages.
- In May 2014 the government announced a further £2 billion for the second phase of the programme. We published a list of the 277 schools to benefit from the second phase of the PSBP on 9 February 2015.
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