The school could open in three years if construction goes to schedule
Ladden Garden Village in North Yate(Image: Bristol Live)
A plan to spend £13 million building a new primary school could be approved next week to serve a town with giant new housing developments.
The school would be built in north Yate to educate the children of families living in the Ladden Garden Village and could open in three years.
The primary school is expected to open in 2028 or 2029, if construction goes according to schedule, with works due to begin early 2027.
Yate, a town 12 miles north-east of Bristol, is growing rapidly, with its population forecast to increase due to thousands of new homes.
The cabinet at South Gloucestershire Council will vote on approving the plan on Monday, May 12.
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A report to the cabinet set out all the details of the plan, including that the school would initially have one class in each year, but space for two classes to allow pupil numbers to grow.
The report said: “Projections indicate that between 2026 and 2028 there will be an estimated one to 1.5 form of entry shortage of school places in a number of year groups.
“The most recent data indicates that there are sufficient places in the reception age group to 2028.
“But as cohorts move through the schools it is likely that for the junior phase, Years 3 to 6, there may be a shortage of school places as more families move into the development.
“This will particularly be the case in some junior age year groups with 10 of the 12 cohorts expected to be facing a shortage of available places across the planning area.”
Details of the layout of the school and its location are still unclear. These should be revealed when the council applies for planning permission to build the school, with an early public consultation expected between November and next January.
Three quarters of the cash to pay for the construction will come from the developers who built the Ladden Garden Village.
The council signed a deal with them back in 2015, known as a Section 106 agreement, where developers contribute to local infrastructure such as schools.
The risk of aiming for a 2028 opening is that children would have to be taught in temporary classrooms, if the school wasn’t finished in time.
This has happened in Bristol, with the Oasis Academy Temple Quarter secondary school, which opened in 2023 and is still in temporary classrooms. The permanent home for the school has been delayed but is due to open in 2027.
Elsewhere in South Gloucestershire, other schools are either being expanded or being built, to meet the growing demand of an increasing population.
Last month the cabinet also approved a plan to double the size of Manorbrook Primary School in Thornbury, when councillors lambasted the historic lack of places for children across the district.
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