Schools and education

This section has been paraphrased from Bolney Parish Council's Reg 19 submission. It is far more up to date than any information which BAG can provide and should be viewed as a snapshot of the situation regarding Bolney CE Primary School in February 2024:
Bolney Primary School already has an assembly hall, a Forest School, a gardening club with vegetable patch on school grounds, a netball court and playground and it has use of adjacent grounds for cricket, football and PE and uses the Rawson Hall for productions. The Early Years section of the school has an outdoor centre on site with mud kitchens. The school recently received £94,000 in Section 106 money from the development on London Road and is about to start work regenerating its playground and climbing frame with some of this money.
The primary school is a typical small village school. Whilst WSCC is of the opinion that it can support the growth proposed at Foxhole Farm, this does not mean that the school would easily cope without putting pressure on its operation.

In addition, BAG believes that the WSCC strategy for location of new primary and secondary schools is still to build in towns rather than villages, probably a matter of scale and where higher numbers of pupils are able to walk to school or use public transport, so any promise from developers to set land aside in Bolney for school use is unlikely to be taken up (and may even have more houses built later instead). Bolney CE Primary school's website sets out prioritisation of entry in line with national policy. In cases of oversubscription, it is likely that children living furthest from the school, e.g. in the lanes, will be increasingly less able to get a place at Bolney school, or indeed several other schools: new builds in adjacent areas such as Sayers Common will put additional pressure on schools in those areas and reduce capacity for Bolney overspill.
The picture for secondary schools is even worse, with children likely to have long journeys when nearby secondary schools become overburdened by large scale new building.

The new planned secondary school in Burgess Hill (Northern Arc) has been further delayed while they go back out to tender, bulletin Oct 2023. The primary school element is being developed and funded separately by Homes England on a nearby site in a later phase of development.