Reunion for a ‘rural’ school

This ensures that rural issues are now making their way onto the local political agenda.

Before Affetside Primary School was closed by Bury's councillors in 2003, anti-closure campaigners fought hard to have the village recognised as rural by both DEFRA and Bury Council.

Working on the common sense assumption that farms, fields, sheep and cows, combined with poor facilities, no pavements and limited street lighting, meant that the area was rural, they wished to invoke the presumption against closure of rural schools'.

In so doing, campaigners were actually fighting for equity for the rural fringes, something which Bury's Labour councillors debated regularly through the BT letters pages.

The LEA and the council always refused to acknowledge the possibility of rurality in Bury, working on the (now obviously incorrect) assumption that belonging to Greater Manchester necessarily meant an urban definition.

This suited the council's proposals to close Affetside's only resource, its primary school, so it is sad that a new definition of rural', taken on board by Greater Manchester, arrived too late from DEFRA, in 2004.

Interestingly, Bury now has villages' aplenty ranging from Tottington to Ainsworth, and has the welcoming signs to prove it!

The school is lost forever, but it is gratifying that DEFRA and the Greater Manchester Rural Resource Unit now acknowledge what campaigners always knew - that Affetside is rural and that much greater consideration should have been given at the time to the impact of the school closure on the local community.

Ahead of our time, maybe, but it is satisfying to have official acknowledgement, four years later, that we campaigners were right all along!

All ex-Affetside pupils and their families are welcome to attend the reunion held at 4pm at the village green.

DAWN ROBINSON-WALSH Blacksnape Road Blacksnape Lancashire