A councillor has declared it is ‘not feasible’ to object proposals to close a primary school which has seen numbers drop to 27 pupils and said: ‘We want the best education for the children’.

Councillor Anne Burns (Old Barrow and Hindpool, Labour) spoke at a meeting of the Furness locality board which discussed the consultation on the proposals to close North Walney Primary and Nursery School from the end of the academic year.

Cllr Burns said: “I don’t think we can actually object to this. I would love to say let’s get out there and get a banner going, and let’s get a group going to object to all this, it’s not a feasible option.

“We’ve got to look at this realistically and we want the best education for the children, we want it to be near their home and we want to try and keep them together if we can. Then after all this happens, we need to sit down and think what we can do about this building for the community rather than it being flattened as it’s too good for that.”

Numbers at the primary school have dropped from 84 in 2019/2020 to 27 as of September 2023 and there is a ‘significant’ number of surplus places in the Walney Island area, a report prepared for the meeting said.

School budgets are directly linked to the number of children at a school so when numbers decrease there is less money available to support teaching and this makes it ‘increasingly challenging’ to provide a ‘broad and balanced quality educational offer’, it added.

The report said: “The local authority is concerned that the school’s current financial position is increasing the workload on school staff to levels that the council believes is reaching an unsustainable level.

“This will inevitably impact on teaching standards and would likely give a reduced rating under the current Ofsted inspection framework.

“The local authority is concerned that staffing instability and funding have also hampered development of leadership at subject level and impacted on the professional development, workload and well-being of staff.”

Councillor Frank Cassidy (Walney Island, Labour), said: “Walney’s three Labour councillors namely myself, Therese Assouad and Anita Husband would like to place on record our wish that North Walney Primary and Nursery School can in the future be re-purposed to accommodate children who find things a bit difficult in mainstream education.

“We say this after taking opinion from a number of senior educators who are familiar with what’s happening locally.”

A public consultation on the closure proposal will end on December 12 and a post-consultation report will be presented to members of the council’s cabinet in January for a decision as to whether or not to proceed to the next stage of the statutory school organisation process.

If the council’s cabinet decide to proceed to the next stage of the statutory process the local authority will be required to formally publish a statutory notice setting out the proposal to close the school.

This will allow all stakeholders a further four weeks to make ‘representations’ about the proposal.

Following the completion of the four-week statutory representation period a report will be submitted to the cabinet in March 2024 for a final decision as to whether the school should close in August.