Central Motors School

DLA planning attended the parish council last week to outline the very broad brush proposals for 135 houses at the old Central Motors site. This includes space for a new lower school. Obviously a lot of attention focused on the school provision, which from its size looks as if it is meant to be additional to the existing school, not a replacement. The answers to most of these questions will come from Central Beds Council. 

Land swap

The chair of governors from Cranfield Lower School and the head teacher attended on Wed evening to discuss the possibility of a landswap between part of the recreation ground and the land allocated to the school on Home farm. They point out that that land on Home Farm is entirely useless to them because of the remoteness from the main site.

This has been manifestly obvious to just about everyone from the word go - a word spoken eight or nine years ago. The only reason large scale housing development got the go-ahead from an earlier enquiry was because it was ruled that this extra land would allow the lower school to grow sufficiently. Education capacity had hitherto been a stumbling block. But this solution is nonsense given the age group concerned. There is even money - more than £100,000 - for a toilet block on the site which needs to be repatriated to the main site somehow, otherwise it will be lost.