Council officers have provided the following update on how children from Chapelton will be accommodated at Newtonhill School (until there is a primary built in the new town), and at Portlethen Academy.

There is nothing particularly new here, but it confirms the direction of travel. The information comes via Kincardine and Mearns area manager Bruce Stewart.

“With over 4,000 houses proposed new town of Chapelton is Aberdeenshire Council’s largest housing allocation, and it is key for housing delivery in the region, located in the southern strategic corridor.

“As part of the vision and masterplan, education facilities and many other facilities have been planned into the development and in line with the Section 75 planning agreement a primary school is to be provided after the 489th house is completed.

“We would highlight that the programme for the delivery of the school is linked to housing delivery on site at Chapelton and this may create some fluidity in the programming.

“Further to continuing conversations and meetings held with the developer, Aberdeenshire Council including the relevant services such as education and the experience Aberdeenshire Council have from other locations it has been identified that an appropriate way forward would be to ‘grow’ a school at Chapelton.

“This approach would also include a virtual school being formed within Newtonhill Primary that would support the growth of the school and be timetabled accordingly with the new build programme, so that on the opening of the new school there would be classes of pupils established and ready to start at the new school. The virtual school process has been successfully used at Hillside Primary also in the south of Aberdeenshire.

“The entire process from virtual school to new build opening on site at Chapelton, will be programmed in conjunction with the housing delivery numbers and the projected pupil yield to ensure that the process is smooth and to manage the capacity at Newtonhill Primary. Aberdeenshire Council recognises the importance for a community to being fully involved in the unique experience of developing a new school and the community will be invited into the process in due course.

“There are many opportunities and benefits to this process which will ultimately shape the future for all learners within a newly created catchment zone.

“The Learning Estates team in collaboration with property colleagues have developed a strong brief which has shaped our primary school new builds in the last 8 years, and council project officers have been developing a proposed schedule of accommodation which is linked to the primary school design brief for Chapelton. This has enabled indicative whole life project costs to be assessed which in turn has fed into the initial stages of the required project governance.

“Regarding capacity at Portlethen Academy, the calculation of capacities for secondary schools is complex. It’s based on an aim for 80% occupancy in Aberdeenshire, so there are always extra teaching spaces available, but we also base it on ensuring we can deliver an effective mix of practical (20 pupil maximum class size) and non-practical (30 max) subjects.

“The stated capacities are what we call ‘published’ capacities which only account for main school buildings, where as our ‘working’ capacities include non-linked units. Practical teaching areas like technical often require fixed equipment so it can sometimes be that the overall capacity of a school is limited until we reconfigure spaces.

“This is where ‘planning’ capacity comes in. From year to year and where there are pinch points in our secondaries, our learning estates team works closely with schools to ensure they have ample space to deliver the right mix of subjects on behalf of their learners.

“We set annual secondary limits and reserved spaces and will not accept placing requests from those out of area when we need to limit numbers. Right now, none of our secondary schools, including Portlethen Academy, are over working capacity and where we are expecting school rolls to increase, we are planning ahead.”