AN eagle-eyed fire crew saved a classroom from going up in flames after vandals started a blaze at a Leigh school last night.

The arsonists set fire to the ground floor classroom at Westleigh High School, Westleigh Lane, by pushing lit cardboard through a window.

Carpet tiles were set alight, spreading to a plastic chair and a pair of curtains.

A fire crew was already on the school's grounds, tackling a pile of rubbish which had been set alight, also from vandals, earlier in the evening.

It was while they were tackling that blaze, that one of the firefighters spotted the flickering of the flames coming from the classroom.

Damage was confined to some of the carpet tiles, a chair and the curtains.

A fire spokesman said: "If the fire had gone undetected for much longer, the whole classroom would have been in danger of going up in smoke."

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