News that a young pupil was injured at a brand new school last week has sparked criticism and further details of damage within the facility
According to BBC.co.uk, a new school in Scotland has been forced to assure parents, staff and pupils alike that the facility is safe following an incident which left a student injured.
The £28m North West Community Campus in Dumfries has brought together three primary schools and one high school, with teachers and pupils moving to the new location last week.
Just two days after it opened, a young girl was struck by a door which fell off its rails, suffering bruising. The school closed on Friday for safety checks.
After a teacher education day on Monday, the school re-opened on Tuesday. Education head, Colin Grant, told BBC Scotland that the door in question has now been removed entirely. It was a door used to cover up coat hooks on walls, but all such doors throughout the facility will also now be removed.
Grant said:
“We’re very disappointed and there’s nobody pretending otherwise that we have not got off to the start we wanted with the new school.
“We were really excited about the new facility; we had 2,000 people over the door last Sunday and it was fantastic to see the young people starting on Tuesday.”
However, Grant also said there had been a number of other small issues that emerged when the school launched, and local officials’ decision to close the school and resolve this issue over the facility’s first ever weekend caused strong criticism on social media.
According to online photos, it appears that a ceiling also collapsed at the school not long before it opened, which has been blamed on a sprinkler fitting error.
Asked if he could reassure all involved that the North West Community Campus is safe, Grant told the BBC:
“Yes, I would like to do that because we’ve probably done far greater levels of checks now than you might normally have done.
“But certainly I can understand why people have lost a bit of confidence.
“We felt it was ready, we were comfortable it was ready. But in fact once you open any new building that becomes operational there’s a lot of people working in there, sometimes you see other things.
“The issue with the sliding rail was the thing that prompted us to say let’s take a pause here, take a bit of extra time to give the fullest reassurance to everyone.”
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