New school in Scarborough will not open until 2021

Eastfield and Osgodby county councillor Tony Randerson (Lab) made the plea at today’s Scarborough and Whitby Area Committee meeting.

Cllr Randerson told the committee that the replacement for Overdale School in Eastfield, which was due to open to pupils in 2020 and would double the number of children it could take, was going to have to go back out to tender.

The school was proposed to deal with the extra pupils that would move into the area as 1,400 new homes are built on the Middle Deepdale site in Eastfield.

Cllr Randerson said: “I’m extremely disappointed that there has been a delay as the tenders came in over budget. What this is going to do is that more and more dwellings are going up on the Middle Deepdale site, there are more and more families moving in and it’s going to put an extra strain on the [existing] Overdale and Braeburn schools. I am really concerned about this. The residents were expecting that school to be up and running in September 2020 and now were are looking at the earliest of summer or autumn 2021.”

North Yorkshire strategic planning manager, Andrew Dixon, told Cllr Randerson that the county council was fully committed to delivering the new school.

He said: “It was an extreme disappointment to us that the previous procurement exercise did not deliver the value that we were expecting.”

Mr Dixon said that the new tender had not yet gone out but was in the process of being compiled.

Cllr Randerson responded: “Tell them to get their skates on.”

The council wants to demolish and rebuild Overdale.

The new school will be double the size of the existing building and be located a mile-away as part of the Jazz Court development of the Middle Deepdale housing project.

It could take a total of 420 students.