ALMOST £700,000 is set to be spent on a project to set up a new social, emotional and mental health needs in Bracknell Forest.

The council is pushing to create the new 50-place primary school due to the personal and financial impact sending children with these needs to schools outside of the borough has.

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According to a budget report, sending youngsters outside of Bracknell Forest can leave them “at a disadvantage” due to the “separation” from their community this can create.

Bracknell Forest Council spends more on supporting children with special educational needs than both the national average and its statistical neighbours.

Therefore, council bosses have proposed spending £660,000 on works to create a new school for 4-11 year-olds with social, emotional and mental health needs as a measure to reduce the financial and personal impacts of supporting vulnerable youngsters.

This money would go towards creating a new facility out of an existing school site in Bracknell Forest which has become surplus to requirements.

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A Bracknell Forest Council budget report read: “We do not have sufficient specialist provision for a growing number of CYP [children and young people] with a primary presentation of SEMH, which is why so many are currently educated out of borough.

“The proposal is to create the new SEMH Hub in existing school accommodation that is or will become surplus as a result of falling school rolls.

“There is currently a 13 per cent surplus of primary places across the borough in the intake year which is forecast to increase over the next five years.

“When suitable surplus school accommodation has been identified, this project will entail conversion/adaptation of the vacated space for SEN [special educational needs] use prior to occupation.”

The report also mentioned Bracknell Forest had experienced an increase in the number of refugee children moving to the borough in recent years, a factor which contributed to the need for a new SEMH facility.

But Rachel Morgan, an assistant education director at BFC, said the rise in the number of refugee children needing support has tailed off.

She said: “Refugee children were referenced because at one point we were working with the troubled families budget where we did have a number of children who were refugee children within Bracknell Forest.

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“That was a few years back now and when those children were with us what we did find was there was quite a lot of trauma and we were having to provide a lot of SEMH support.

“One of the things the data did flag up was that most of those children have now grown up and aren’t necessarily still within the school system, but we were providing quite a lot of therapeutic services for those children.”

This plan has been earmarked as a future project as outlined in BFC’s draft capital budget proposals, which are now open for consultation.

Residents can have their say on the budget plans by heading to the council’s consultation page, which can be found here.

The consultation closes on Wednesday, January 27. Following this, revised budget plans will be published and voted on by the council in February.