Park Academy: 80s style solution to boost size of popular Sheffield school
A popular Sheffield school, one of the city’s biggest, is hoping to expand - using an 80s style solution.
Park Academy, on Beaumont Road North, Manor, is looking to bring in mobile buildings to provide a new block of six classrooms on its site.
Mobile classrooms were a popular measure to bring extra teaching space into schools quickly in the 1970s and 1980s, and were a feature at schools across the city for some time, before a wave of new buildings were put in place.
Now Park Academy has applied for planning permission to bring in a block of six classrooms, which would be dropped into a space next to the main building, on the Prince of Wales Road side of the site.
Under the plans, the six 56 square metre classrooms would be grouped in a two storey block, with three on each floor. Each floor would also have a toilet block, the girls’ downstairs and the boys upstairs.
There would also be a covered block with stairs inside taking pupils up to the upper floor. The buildings would be grey, according to drawings included in the plans.
Aerial pictures show a sports court painted on the site where it would be placed.
Park Academy is part of United Learning, a national group of schools.
At its last Ofsted inspection in December 2022, Ofsted inspectors confirmed that it continued to be a ‘good’ school. In their report, they praised a range of aspects of the academy.
It is not the first Sheffield school to look into adding mobile buildings to its site.
Dore Primary School opened a unit in 2021 to accommodate what Sheffield Council called a “single bulge year group”.
The £300,000 unit at Dore was to create capacity for an additional class of 30 pupils, and was put in place for a seven year period to take that class through primary school from reception to year six.
And last year a planning application was submitted to put up a two-story block of four mobile classrooms at Yewlands School, on Creswick Lane in Grenoside.
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