A VILLAGE school has been saved from closure – and is now giving its youngest pupils the best possible start to their education.

Eppleby Forcett CE primary is now the setting for the education of two to five-year-olds within the federation of Eppleby Forcett and Middleton Tyas. Children aged six to eleven are taught at the larger Middleton Tyas site.

The new setting was opened by local Tory Rishi Sunak who said: “This is a sensible solution to a problem faced by many small rural schools.

“Collaboration like this is a way of sustaining schools in small communities -with all the benefits that brings - and making sure pupils receive the best start to their school lives.”

The new arrangements have secured the future of Eppleby Forcett school which could have been facing closure due to falling rolls.

It has also ensured the end of teaching more than one age group in a single class and enabled the whole federation to have single age group classes.

Executive headteacher Maxine Price said that the new early years setting at Eppleby kept the village school viable.

“We could have let things carry on with falling rolls until Eppleby Forcett school was unsustainable,” she said

“By bringing together the reception children from both our schools and Eppleby Pre-school we have secured its future.

“It has also ensured that pupils in the same year group are taught together at both sites – something we couldn’t do with such low numbers at Eppleby and the limited space we had at Middleton Tyas.”

The new arrangements were successfully trialled during 2015 after extensive alteration works at Eppleby Forcett and made permanent at the start of the school year.