Manchester school bosses are planning for a huge expansion of primary schools amid fears of a population explosion.
Manchester council is conducting a city-wide review of classroom places as it prepares for a surge in pupil numbers.
Many of the city’s 127 primary schools are already at bursting point and would be unable to accommodate more students without being expanded.
The cash would be used to extend existing primary schools and, in some cases, build new ones.
Many parents have complained that they are struggling to register their children, with mums and dads in the south of the city complaining that places at good schools are ‘like gold dust’.
All of Manchester’s secondary schools have been refitted in recent years through the now defunct Building Schools for the Future programme.
The government has committed £500m for building or refitting primary schools in England.
Manchester is hoping to secure a substantial share of the fund – possibly in the region of £10m. But the cash would only likely cover a small part of a re-building programme – fuelling fears that council bosses would be forced to opt for the cheaper option of building temporary classrooms.
Jenny Andrews, deputy director of children’s services, said her officers were currently looking at local growth figures for each part of the city and the condition of each school.
She said: "The challenge for us going forward is the extent to which there is sufficient capital to do much new-build rather than part-new build.
"We benefited massively from new secondary schools but we are in a new financial climate with quite significantly changed needs. We have started a piece of work to identify where the priority areas are.
"With some schools we will be able to replace some temporary classrooms with permanent ones, in other cases we may look at more significant changes."
Their report, which will outline different solutions, will be presented to councillors later this year.
Coun Afzal Khan said: "There is population growth across the UK and there are far more people moving to Manchester from other cities. It means we are going to have this pressure on our school places for the next few years.
"We have added new places to many of our schools but are operating at our maximum level."
Official figures showed a ‘mini-baby boom’, with the number of children of nursery and primary school age in England set to rise by 14 per cent between 2010 and 2018. A fifth of primary schools in England are already full or over capacity.
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Its obvious this "baby boom" is created by the increase in Immigration over the last few years, satistics would be able to varify that but please do not accuse me of racism for mentioning the dreaded I word.
So councils making an excellent job of planning for the needs of the city's young, as usual.
Maybe Whaller Ranger or others could come and explain why they would be better at running bus services?
Only a small part of the Baby boom relates to immigration. If you take a look at the figures showing how single parent numbers, teen pregnancies & increasing family sizes have dramatically increased over the last 15 years - I think we can deduce that the increase is largely due to the culture of 'Benefit Britian'.
If we did not pay people to sit at home all day & give them more for having child after child, then the so called 'baby boom' would not exist. When the benefits system was not so generous & our society put greater emphasis on hard work & effort to achieve goals, we had a decrease in birth rates.
Stop paying people to have children when they cannot afford to support them themselves - only then will the Baby Boom decline.
Although I agree that immigration and baby farming for benefits are largely to blame,governments must take most of the responsibility for not curbing immigration and for paying child allowance for ALL children instead of one or two!
But it happened and they still did nothing to accommodate and increased population. For examples. We are short of water--- dig out more reservoirs.We are short of school places--- build more schools and train more teachers. We are short of power------ build more nuclear power stations instead of wasting time and money on stupid windmills. We are short of hospitals---- build more and train more staff,at the same time get rid of unnecessary bureaucracy.We have clogged up roads--- build more roads. etc etc.
How could they have funded everything,you may ask. Could have kicked the EU into touch,not gone into silly wars in Iraq,Afghanistan,Egypt ,Libya etc. Stopped foreign aid except for emergency relief,etc. But life is perfect in hindsight. So much money wasted through rank bad management. It's criminal!
my parents had to pretend they were married just to get me into a good primary school and that was 1996. thought the system would have improved by now!