Honiton Primary School to grow by 50%

Children will have to be "shipped elsewhere" otherwise

Honiton Primary School's going to grow by half. Plans had already been revealed to increase pupil numbers from 420 to 630. Now councillors have given it the thumbs up.

It will cost £2.7 million, of which £1.5 million will come from developers building houses nearby, and the remainder will come from Devon County Council taxpayers. East Devon District Council, Honiton Town Council and Sport England all objected. The main complaint was that public playing fields would be lost.

Devon County Council says that's true. But councillor Phil Twiss, who's also a governor of the school says educational needs outweigh the amenity for residents. He said: “The loss of 21 per cent of playing fields is significant, but there are proposals by the adjoining Honiton Community College for an all-weather, synthetic turf pitch for both educational and community use which would increase capacity at all times of the year, and access to this would offset the loss. On balance, the merits of approval significantly outweigh refusal. The playing fields will be for an educational purpose and not disposed of for housing and it is unanimously supported by governors and the teaching staff.”

Cllr Jerry Brook, chairman of the committee, said: “A failure to provide education means that the children in the town will have to be shipped out somewhere else, and I don’t think that would be an acceptable thing.”

Cllr Philip Sanders described the balance of the application as ‘a tricky one’. He said: “When I first read this, I thought, why are we recommending approval when everyone we consulted objected “But then I read it again and thought that if we want to educate young people, this is the only acceptable solution in the Honiton area and there isn’t an alternative. Unless someone can think of an as-of-yet un-thought of or out of the box proposal, we do need to educate pupils and this is the right place for it. I cannot think of an alternative that will deliver what we need to deliver education in Honiton.

The committee was told that there are currently 1,024 primary school pupils living in the Honiton town catchment area, served by Honiton Primary and Littletown Primary Schools, only 841 pupils attend these two schools and the remainder attend the village schools in the rural locality.

Recommending approval, Mike Deaton, Chief Planner acknowledged the impact the school's growth would have on parking and traffic on the surrounding streets. He said: "However, these impacts are not considered to be at an unacceptable level and are ultimately associated with new developments coming online.

As Sport England had objected to the plans, the application will now be sent to the Secretary of State for final approval and to see if they want to call it in for further scrutiny before the final approval notice can be granted. If everything goes through, building will begin in September 2019.