TWO new schools are preparing to welcome their first ever pupils after a £58.3 million building project was completed – four years later than originally intended.
Lyde Green Community School will welcome around 150 Year 7 pupils to its site in Honeysuckle Road, Lyde Green, in September.
The school will eventually have a capacity of 900 pupils aged 11 to 16, and is run by the Olympus Trust, which also runs Winterbourne Academy.
Its opening will ease the pressure on other oversubscribed schools locally, including Downend School.
Head teacher Tom Hill said around a third of the first intake of 11-year-old pupils are from Lyde Green itself, with the rest from Emersons Green, Pucklechurch and the wider area.
The new pupils and members of the local community have already visited the school, and Mr Hill said everyone who stepped inside had been “gushing with praise”.
Next door, a primary school with a capacity for 420 pupils will welcome its first 21 Reception children.
It is being run in tandem with the existing Lyde Green Primary School in Willowherb Road by the Castle School Education Trust, which also runs Downend School.
Primary school head teacher Tom Hutchings said the new building will also host all three of its twin school’s Year 6 classes, around 80 pupils, who are being moved to Honeysuckle Road partly to support their transition to the secondary school and also to relieve crowding at the oversubscribed Willowherb Road site.
The opening of the schools follows decades of campaigning for a secondary school to serve the Emersons Green area.
Funding was first secured in early 2021 and the schools had originally been due to open the following year, but the project was hit by a series of delays.
In the meantime, neighbouring secondary schools had to increase capacity, hosting extra classes to accommodate the demand.
The new schools are the largest in England to have been built to eco-friendly Passivhaus standards, which will ensure they are carbon neutral, warmer in winter, cooler in summer, and cheaper to run.
Around £34.3m of funding came from the Department for Education, with £24m from South Gloucestershire Council.
Council cabinet member for schools Ian Boulton said: “Long-promised and now delivered, these state-of-the-art schools will serve the Lyde Green community for generations.
“Getting this project moving after years of delays was a key priority for this administration. It’s just one of many developments for our children and young people that will make a real difference to families in South Gloucestershire.”