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Sunday 2 May 2021

The Heights school's opening pushed back to September 2021

The Heights primary school has announced that sadly the DfE has pushed back the school's planned opening at Mapledurham Playing Fields (MPF) to September 2021. 

This is a huge disappointment to the children, families, staff and governing body who had been gearing themselves up to move in after half-term this June. It too will be a big disappointment to the residents who live by the temporary building off Gosbrook Road. 

The benefits though are that by September the school will be complete and fully functioning, as should be the surrounding works to MPF.

Kier, the DfE's contractors have cited the following reasons for the delay to completing the build:

  1. Delays in arranging connection for all the utilities
  2. Progress being hampered severely by the temporary closure of the access which significantly impacted deliveries of both labour and materials
  3. Covid-19 social distancing and working hours restrictions have meant they cannot increase labour to levels needed to claw back time lost due to reasons 1 and 2 above
  4. An area in the car park/Early Years Play Area that subsided. This was only discovered when the additional welfare units were removed. An independent report has been commissioned to establish the reason, but quite extensive additional groundworks may be required.
I do not as yet have further information about reason 4 above, but am pressing to find out more as this will be of particular interest to some of my residents.