29th August 2026
Stockport Council was forced to directly rebut a resident’s warning that four-year-old pupils would be dropped off at a turning circle and left to walk unaccompanied along a busy lane to a new school, in correspondence exchanged just days before councillors made their final decision on the development.
In a letter dated 14 August 2007, campaigner Sheila Oliver told a Department for Children, Schools and Families official that traffic consultants Faber Maunsell had introduced further proposals for the Harcourt Street school in North Reddish only days before the decisive Tame Valley Area Committee meeting, without consultation. Under those proposals, she said, young children would be dropped off at a turning circle and would have to walk up what she described as an already dangerous, narrow and congested lane to reach the school entrance — a route she said would only get worse once a 600-pupil school and children’s centre opened on the site.
Oliver said she had tried to raise the issue directly with the council’s Head of Traffic Services, Nick Whelan, but was told — while he was away on holiday — to submit the query through the Freedom of Information process instead. She noted that route could take weeks or, based on the council’s track record, months, by which point the planning application would already have been decided without what she called proper discussion of “the vital point:” whether four-year-olds could be left to walk alone through a notoriously dangerous traffic area.
The council’s written response, sent two days before the final committee decision, directly contradicted that account. Freedom of Information officer Andy McAlpine wrote that it was “not suggested that young children should be dropped off on street and walk unaccompanied to the school.” Instead, he said, parents would be likely to park for short periods while accompanying their children onto the school site, with parents of infant-age children expected to wait until their child had entered the building — and the same pattern anticipated at home time.
The exchange leaves two sharply different official accounts on record of what the approved scheme actually required in practice: an objector’s warning that unaccompanied young children would be exposed to a dangerous walking route, and the council’s formal position that this was never the intended arrangement. Both statements were made in writing, days apart, in the final run-up to the decision.
It has not been established which account more closely matched what actually happened once the school opened, though a 2011 council report — covered previously — later documented serious ongoing traffic and safety problems at the site’s pedestrian access, and Reddish Police raised concerns of their own about the location.
