The village primary that went from six pupils to two hundred in eighteen months

In 2024 the primary school in a north Sutherland village had six pupils on the roll and appeared on a review of schools with fewer than ten. Parents campaigned against closure and won a stay.

It now has 207 pupils and a waiting list.

Four temporary classrooms occupy what was the football pitch. A fifth is on order. The staff room is a corridor.

Where they came from

The intake is almost entirely from families relocating from England, predominantly the south east, over eighteen months. Twenty-two nationalities are now represented in a school that two years ago had six children from four families.

The headteacher is careful and repeated the point three times: the children are settling well, the existing families have been generous, and the school is a better place for the arrival of a hundred new voices in the playground.

The problem is not the children.

“I need four teachers. I can recruit four teachers. I cannot house four teachers. There is not one property available in this village at a price a probationer could pay, and there were nine last summer.”

The headteacher

The housing loop

The same properties that brought the families are the properties the staff would need. Nine long-term rentals in the village have gone in twenty months: five sold to incoming families, four converted to short lets.

The council has costed modular staff accommodation. It is in a capital programme for 2029.

The closure list

One detail has been noted repeatedly at parent council meetings, usually with a particular tone.

The school was two years from closure. The same authority that proposed closing it is now paying for five portacabins, and would have been paying instead to bus 207 children forty miles.

“We were told the village had no future,” one of the original six parents said. “Turns out it had a future. Nobody asked us what we wanted it to look like.”