Plans for St Paul's School

Tuesday, March 5, 2019 - 11:23

Minister for Education John Cortes has presented the new Refurbishment Designs for St. Paul’s First School at Varyl Begg Estate. This was revealed at the School yesterday morning by a panel consisting of Minister Cortes, Director of Education Jackie Mason, Head Teacher Rosanna Hitchcock and Senior Projector Manager for the Department of Plans for St Paul’s School Education Damian Muscat. 

St. Paul’s will remain in the same location and will not be replaced with a new building. Plans include the enlargement and expansion of the current nursery which currently caters for around 40 children, but which is looking to cater for 80 after refurbishment. This was highlighted by Damian Muscat as the ‘main aim’ of the project, alongside the construction of a new dining room to replace the old one and the creation of a ‘forest school’ for outdoor learning, on the land that was previously the old dining hall. A new library and disability access are also included in the plans for refurbishment. The school will additionally also benefit from a ‘refurbishment of the aging facade to keep it more with the times’.

Minister Cortes said ‘At the time our Government announced the new school project, we reassured the public, the teachers and obviously the parents of the children that just because the school wasn’t going to be moved to a brand new location, we weren’t going to forget the schools if they stay where they are. Already since then, we’ve done quite a lot of work in most of the schools. We’ve done a re-roofing of St Mary’s School. We’ve done repairs and refurbishments in St Joseph’s School and one or two other bits of work that we announced last year and some things that you never hear about because we just get on as we don’t make a press statement about everything we do, but St. Paul’s was one where we also did some work over last summer improving classrooms but now we are going to launch a major refurbishment and renewal of St. Paul’s School...but it just goes to show that we meant what we said that we want to give teachers and children the best teaching and learning environment that we possibly can. St. Paul’s is a great school but it needs some work and we’re going to do it and take the opportunity to be able to do new things too. One of the things that we have to do of course is accommodate more nursery children as we expand nursery provision to all children in Gibraltar whose parents want them to have a government nursery placement.’

05-03-19 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR