Report snubs Central

BANGOR Central’s dream new building looks farther away than ever this week after it was left out of the Education Minister’s schools revamp report.

The integrated primary school was expecting to get a letter from Education Minister Caitriona Ruane telling it how it did in her provincewide review of new school builds.

Now it turns out that it wasn’t even included in the review, even though school staff were told it would be and the minister herself said Central was in the review during a debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

A total of 69 schools across the province had their construction plans put on ice by Ms Ruane last year while her department assessed how worthwhile those plans would be in the long term.

Last Tuesday (29th) the minister went before the Assembly to tell MLAs the review was over, at which point she controversially refused to say which schools were assessed, let alone how they actually did.

At the beginning of this week the department finally released the full list of schools – but Bangor Central didn’t appear on it.

Now the department insists that Central wasn’t in the review and staff were not told that the primary would be.

With the school year over headmaster Peter Campbell is currently away, but the last time the Spectator spoke to him, last Wednesday (30th), he was expecting to get word from Ms Ruane on how well Central did in the review.