1:00pm Friday 25th September 2009
By Stephen Mather
SCHOOLS Secretary Ed Balls officially opened Cowley Language College’s impressive new £18m school and stressed the importance of investing in St Helens’ pupils.
Speaking exclusively to the Star, Mr Balls said that the new facility was one of the best designed schools in the country and would be seen as a trailblazer for others across the country.
He said: “Schools like this are about raising aspirations.
"It’s about saying to young people and the community that it’s important to get good qualifications and we are going to help you make that happen.
“The building is only part of it. You can have great leadership but you can struggle if you have badly designed, leaking buildings.
"What this does is give a massive opportunity for the school to do well and all the evidence is that if you do a lot of music, sport or drama, it’s not just fun for the young people, it reflects directly in their exam results.”
Emphasising the importance of having such a modern, eco friendly school in St Helens, he added: “Sometimes communities, which have not seen investment for a long time, can develop a culture that says maybe we aren’t that important. But this school says you are top priority.”
Mr Balls spent time chatting to some of the Year 8 pupils during their science class and was encouraged by their reaction to their new surroundings.
Many said it was a massive improvement on their old building and they felt better about coming to school.
He added: “I think this is one of the best designed schools I have seen. Not just because of the environmental specification, we are trying to get the best environmental designs and spread them across the country. But when you are doing it first time round it costs you a bit more, so that’s why they have managed to do so well on the environment, but I don’t think they have traded that off against the flexibility of education.
“Sometimes you walk round with a head teacher who will say ‘I would have liked a bit more of this, or that’, but with this head teacher, he said, this is what I wanted!”
The new school boasts an array of high tech and environmentally friendly features, including a biometric system, which scans pupils’ fingerprints as they collect their dinners, an information panel consisting of 16 plasma TV screens, a biomass burner and a facility to collect and recycle rainwater.
Mr Balls continued: “This is a school with 60 per cent carbon reduction, all water is recycled, there is a wood chip boiler, but in the end we are trying to get to fully zero carbon schools, which are able to regenerate their heat.
"We are not quite there yet, but this will really help us to get there. In finding a way to do that and fit it into sensible budgets in a cost effective way is a challenge, but we are learning and this school is an important part of that learning.”
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