Case Study 1: Stormy future for classes that suffer in the rain

A WEST Yorkshire secondary school, so run-down that parts of the building cannot be used when it rains due to the leaky roof, will not now be replaced.

Teachers and pupils at Nab Wood School in Bingley are "devastated" after plans to replace their dilapidated 40-year-old school with a new 22m campus were cancelled by the coalition Government.

Senior staff have been drawing up plans for the new school for the past 18 months, and work had been expected to get under way around the end of the year. But the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme means Nab Wood pupils will now continue their education in a crumbling, building for many years to come.

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"This is very serious for us," said headteacher Elaine Shoesmith. "Basically Nab Wood is a 40-year-old building with a flat roof that's in a very poor state of repair. We get terrible leaks – when it rains there are areas we cannot use because it leaks so badly."

Mrs Shoesmith and her team have been working on their BSF bid since late 2008 and more than 1,000 hours of planning work has been wasted.

"We'd got down to the level of choosing what sort of tables we would like in the classroom, of choosing the decor," she said.

"We've put hours and hours into planning the new school. We were expecting work to get underway basically in a matter of months – now to find out it's not going ahead at all is just terrible. We've had an emergency briefing this morning and morale is very, very low."

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She added: "Obviously the pupils would have had access to much better facilities. But also lot of our students come from fairly deprived backgrounds in the centre of Bradford, and they had said to us was they felt the powers-that-be were now actually doing something for them – that they felt they were worth investing in."