A primary school in Barrow is a step closer to closing at the end of the academic year.

Members of the cabinet for Westmorland and Furness Council decided to proceed to the next stage of the process for the closure of North Walney Primary and Nursery School and will 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.

In a public consultation period which ended in December, the council received 17 responses to the proposed closure with five respondents stating concerns that the quality of education for the children would be negatively affected from being compelled to relocate to other schools.

However, a council report says: “the local authority is confident that, in the event of a decision to close the school that all pupils would be able to be accommodated within local schools within a ‘reasonable walking distance’ to their family home. It was also noted all local schools in area were categorised a ‘good’ at their most recent Ofsted inspections.”

Councillor Anne Burns (Old Barrow and Hindpool, Labour) previously said at a Furness locality board meeting: “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 council report prepared for the Furness locality board 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) previously 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.”

Members of the cabinet for Westmorland and Furness Council approved the publishing of the statutory notice and statutory proposal for the proposed closure of North Walney Nursery and Primary School at Barrow Town Hall on Tuesday January 23.