Wallasey school lines up £60m redevelopment

Mosslands School is working with the Department for Education on a replacement school, sports facilities and playing fields project, aiming for a planning submission by April.

Consultation is now live online, the project advancing after Wirral Council secured funding from the DfE.

Papers prepared for Wirral Council’s policy & resources committee earlier this month outlined the need for the local authority to come up with £3.4m in match funding, a local contribution to the DfE’s £65m input.

The project team is in place, and includes contractor Willmott Dixon, planning consultancy Plan Red, architect Ellis Williams, Mace, Tace and landscape architect Oobe.

Mosslands is described as a fully comprehensive school offering education for 1,100 boys aged 11-19, with a mixed sixth form and describes itself as the first school in the regio to be recognised as a STEAM (science, tech, engineering art and maths) Centre of Excellence.

The development’s overarching goal is to give the school capacity to accommodate 1,500 pupils, along with a small increase in staff numbers from 110 to 122.

To do that, the new school will be a single three-storey building with two sports halls and a replacement all-weather sports pitch, along with a multi-use games area.

The new building would be built in stages, on the northern part of the existing Wallacre playing fields next to Mosslands.

• View the consultation here

Effectively, land is being swapped around. The school has no current sports fields of its own, and has an old sports hall. By releasing four acres of the Wallacre fields, Wirral Council will enable this development; in return the school will give back 3.7 acres of secure, modern fields for use by school and community.

The area currently taken up by the school will, once it moves into the new building, be taken up by sports fields and parking.

Wirral Council will take forward plans for the southern part of the Wallacre independently. For now, they wil lbe retained as sports pitches.

Facilities at the school will also be available for community use, with separate entrances to a sprots hall. Safeguarding will be embedded in design, with separate changing facilities for pupils and the public. There will be controlled access to out of hours learning in areas such as art and music.

Using solar panels and heat pumps could lead to savings of £160,000 a year running the complex, the team said.

With consultation carried out, the hope is for the planning process to be entered into this March, with construction starting in autumn, aiming for completion in spring 2027 on stage one.

The first pupils could move across from Easter 2027, although the completion of stage two would not be reached until summer 2028, as the new playing pitches will need time to mature.

Rooftop solar will contribute to greening the estate. Credit: consultation documents