A NEW Bootle ‘super school’ is to be sponsored by a Liverpool university in the hope more pupils will embrace higher education.
Hope University will team up with the Archdiocese of Liverpool and church trustees Salesian for the new academy
The £35m, 1,050 place academy is set to replace Bootle’s Savio Catholic High and Litherland’s St Wilfrid’s Catholic High on one of their current sites as part of £80m transformation of Sefton’s high schools by 2014.
The scheme is using money from the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.
In March last year the government made Sefton’s scheme a priority paving the way for the local authority to formulate detailed plans on how it intends to alter the borough’s educational landscape
Today it was confirmed Hope University will play a major part in the new school – which as an academy is free to set its own curriculum.
Its involvement will be in the shape of expertise.
And Cllr Peter Dowd, the council’s cabinet member for education, is confident having the university on board will see more students go on to higher education.
He said: “It is important that we get links with higher education from an early age and get pupils to think about university and what it entails.”
Hope already sponsors the joint Catholic and Church of England Hope Academy due to be open in Newton-le-Willows in September 2011. It is also set to sponsor an all boys £18m academy replacing De La Salle school in Croxteth next year.
The university said the Catholic ethos of the academy complemented its own faith. As well as working with pupils its involvement will include the professional development of teachers at the academy, utilised by its own trainee teachers.
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