North Northamptonshire Council Executive report to discuss new primary school at Glenvale Park, Wellingborough

31 May 2023

An item before North Northamptonshire Council’s Executive next week will discuss how a new primary school will help cater for the growing population in and around Wellingborough.

Glenvale Park will provide an additional 3,000 new homes and in preparation for new families moving into the area, the school, which has been built by the developer Glenvale Park LLP, is due for completion this Autumn.

As the estate grows, Primary aged children from the Glenvale development would be invited to apply for a school place as part of the normal admissions process.

However, with an appropriate number of primary school places currently available in Wellingborough, it is not envisaged that demand to open a whole school, and receive Department for Education funding, would be high enough until the start of the school year in September 2025.

As a result, and subject to Executive approval, North Northamptonshire Council would seek expressions of interest from existing primary schools to move to the brand-new facility from September 2024.

It would enable a school in poor or unsuitable accommodation to move to a purpose-built facility while the vacated smaller site could be re-purposed for other educational uses.

Providing enough school places in the area is a statutory requirement for the Council and I’m delighted that the developer has built a new school ready on the site.

It’s important to get the infrastructure in place ready for when families move into the area to make sure we can meet this new demand.

I’m also very pleased that we can make use of this wonderful new school until the bulge of new demand comes through and offer some contemporary accommodation for an existing school which would face challenges with their current site.Cllr Scott Edwards, the Council’s Executive Member for Children, Families, Education and Skills

Getting the social infrastructure correct to align with a growing population is essential and I’m thrilled to see that we’ll have a new primary school in this area to meet growing demand. I’m also delighted that we have found a clever solution in the interim so this new facility can be of use as quickly as is practicable.Cllr Jason Smithers, Leader of the Council

If approved, then the process would be presented to the DfE for its formal agreement to proceed.

Officers from the Council would then launch the ‘relocation of an existing school’ competition with a view to completing this by October 2023 and returning to Executive in November 2023 for a formal decision.

The school at Glenvale Park would be a co-educational mainstream sponsored academy primary school for children aged four to 11 years, with a total capacity of 420 pupils (two forms in each year group), once fully open.

The council’s Executive will meet on Thursday, June 8 at 10am at the Cube in Corby. The papers are available online and the meeting will be livestreamed on YouTube.