29th August 2026
Stockport Council’s own project team knew, more than a year before the Harcourt Street school opened, that it was being built smaller than the council’s own projections said the area would need — and treated the decision to cap its size as confidential before it became public.
The Figures
Minutes from a Design Sub Group meeting on 28 April 2006 record that the council had settled on a brief requiring the new school to follow national guidelines for a 2.5 form of entry primary school, designed to teach 525 children with an annual intake of 75. In the same meeting, the council’s own Children & Young People’s Directorate produced projections showing 563 children would need places if every child then attending the Fir Tree and North Reddish schools — which the new school was to replace — were offered one. A note added after the meeting recorded that the latest projection had been revised to 555. Either figure was well above the 525 the school was actually being designed to hold.
The minutes show the council’s project team was alive to the shortfall and weighed up how to handle it. Four options were considered: capping numbers by sending some children to other existing schools (“breaks the promise of a place for every child,” the minutes note); a temporary classroom until the school’s roll fell to around 525 (recorded as the group’s favoured option, “subject to funding”); increasing class sizes and mixing year groups (rejected by the teaching staff present as educationally unacceptable); and building an additional permanent classroom to accommodate every child who needed a place. That fourth option was explicitly noted as delivering full, inclusive provision for every child — but was set aside as exceeding the budget brief, expensive, and likely to leave the school with surplus space once demand eventually eased.
Treated as Confidential
A month earlier, in March 2006, the council’s own internal correspondence shows this capacity decision was handled as sensitive information ahead of its public disclosure. An email from a senior council officer forwarding the revised brief — that the school “must be built to a 2.5 form of entry size and no larger” — instructed a colleague to treat the matter confidentially, stating plainly: “I stress the need for confidentiality, that includes everyone at this stage,” and noting the decision would only become public at the next Project Board meeting.
The Warning, and the Numbers That Followed
Nearly two years later, in February 2008, resident Sheila Oliver put a formal question to the council through the Mayor at a full council meeting, addressed to Cllr Weldon. Citing the council’s own documents, she stated there were already not enough places for children at the proposed school and that the birth rate in the area was rising sharply, asking whether it would be more sensible to keep and improve Fir Tree School — by then no longer classed as failing — alongside the existing North Reddish Junior and Infant Schools, rather than replace them all with a single, smaller building.
Freedom of Information data the council supplied to Oliver around the same time lent support to her concern. Live births in the North Reddish locality were recorded at 200 in 2003/04, 188 in 2004/05, and 185 in 2005/06 — before rising to 224 in 2006/07, the year immediately before the council finalised its plans.
The Wider Picture
The shortfall at Harcourt Street was not an isolated local difficulty. A press report from the period, headlined “Solving school place crisis will cost £81m,” recorded that Stockport Council was preparing to spend more than £81 million tackling a borough-wide shortage of primary school places, after closing 14 schools over the preceding decade while opening nine new ones. Opposition councillors blamed the crisis on funding decisions that left the council covering costs the government should have met, while acknowledging around 2,525 additional places would need to be created across the borough by 2016.
The Unanswered Question
The council’s own paperwork shows it built to a fixed budget figure rather than to its own projected demand, treated the decision as confidential ahead of public disclosure, and rejected — on cost grounds — the one option its own minutes acknowledged would have guaranteed a place for every child. A resident’s warning that this would leave the area short of school places, made two years before the wider borough-wide crisis became public knowledge, appears to have been well founded.
