WOODSIDE Special School is to be renamed when it splits and moves to two new sites next year.

Education bosses are delighted with the news, revealed in the BEN yesterday, that the government has come up with a £3.5 million New Deal for Schools grant to allow Woodside Senior School to move to a refurbished Deane School site and the junior school to move in alongside Masefield County Primary in Little Lever.

And in keeping with the new start for the school it is to be renamed. At the Deane site it will be called Rumworth School and the junior section will be known as Ladywood School.

Bolton education department has been working on the scheme to move Woodside Special School, which caters for up to 240 pupils with moderate learning difficulties, from their current site on Chorley New Road, for months.

The idea included the controversial selling off of grazing land at Deane School to housing developer Barratt, to help fund the project.

That has now gone ahead, raising more than £2m from the sale of the eight- acre site and the latest government grant means work can start on the scheme next month.

Contractors will begin at Masefield Primary school, building two new classrooms and improve the entrance and parking. The 80 Ladywood junior pupils, aged four to 12 will move into their section of the building in September next year.

But the major part of the project with be at the Deane School site where the building with be divided into two and completely refurbished.

A new pitched roof will be put onto part of the building, the ugly 1960s concrete cladding replaced with modern materials and windows and doors changed.

In addition a state of the art Learning Resource Centre and Information Technology suite will be created as well as a suite of science laboratories.

The division of the building is being done in such a way that the only facilities the Deane School and the new Rumworth School will share are the dining hall, sports block and Deane Farm.

Imaginative

Work on the refurbishment is due to start in August and will be ready for Rumworth School to move in in September next year.

Terry Piggott, Bolton's deputy education director, said: "The Deane School will have the best premises of any school in Bolton.

"To all intents and purposes we are getting three new schools and we believe the co-location of the special and mainsream schools will bring benefits. It will help to overcome prejudices."

Deane School's associate headteacher Chris Roberts described the scheme as "imaginative and ambitious".

"I am absolutely thrilled. Nothing will hold us back now. It is brilliant," he said.

And Bolton's chairman of education, Cllr Don Eastwood added: "The improvements that will be made will help the education of lots of children and give everyone a much better environment to work in."

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