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Morgan Sindall starts Chester schools

26 Jun 15 Morgan Sindall has begun two school building projects in Chester, under contracts together worth more than £15m.

Morgan Sindall get started on new premises for Blacon High School (and below)
Morgan Sindall get started on new premises for Blacon High School (and below)

Morgan Sindall has started work this month on an £11.5m rebuild of Blacon High School and the £3.6m rebuild of JH Godwin Primary School, both of which are in Blacon, Chester.

The two projects are part of 12 schools to be delivered by Morgan Sindall under the Education Funding Agency’s (EFA) priority school building programme (PSBP), which aims to provide purpose-built school buildings to those in most need of repair and replacement.

Blacon High School is currently housed in three separate buildings and these will be replaced by a single three-storey building for its 600 pupils. A phased demolition will allow the school to remain open and lessons to continue as normal while the new school is built.

JH Godwin Primary School is currently in a two-storey building with limited accessibility to the upper floor. The new build is taking place as a phased demolition, similar to Blacon High School, while lessons continue in the remaining section of the school for its 210 pupils. The new school will have 1,325 m2 of floor space and seven classrooms.

JH Godwin Primary is scheduled to be open in April 2016 and Blacon High School is scheduled to be completed in August 2016.

Morgan Sindall area director Barry Roberts said: “Both Blacon High and JH Godwin Primary are great community schools that will really benefit from the priority school building programme. The new design makes the best use of the space available on both sites and will give the schools an enhanced presence in the local community.”

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Through the national PSBP programme, 261 schools will be rebuilt or have their condition needs met by the EFA, the first of which was completed in 2014. All schools within the programme will be delivered by the end of 2017.

These two projects form part of the North West Private Finance batch, which reached financial close in March 2015.  This batch includes a total of 12 schools in Chester, Wigan, Manchester, Stockport, Merseyside, Halton and Blackpool. Across the programme, where possible, each new school will be built on land within the existing school boundary, allowing the school to remain open during construction of the new buildings. Once complete, the school will move into the new teaching facilities while the old buildings are demolished and external landscaping works are completed.

Morgan Sindall’s contract covers the design and build of the new schools and the hard facilities management for 25 years. Designers have used level two building information modelling (BIM), enabling the different disciplines involved in design and construction to share information more easily.

The full list of schools that Morgan Sindall is delivering under the PSBP is:

Secondary schools

  • Blacon High School, Blacon, Chester
  • The Deanery Church of England High School and Sixth Form College, Wigan
  • Neston High School, Neston, Wirral
  • Ridgeway High School, Prenton, Wirral
  • South Shore Academy, Blackpool

Primary schools

  • Bedford Drive Primary School, Birkenhead
  • Bridge Hall Primary School, Stockport
  • Dee Point Primary School, Blacon, Chester
  • Halebank Primary School, Halebank, Halton
  • Hawes Side Primary School, Blackpool
  • JH Godwin Primary School, Blacon, Chester
  • Plymouth Grove Primary School, Manchester

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