Our health and safety officer was concerned deeply that at parent pick up and drop off times the existing car park was already full, accordingly there was no where for parents to properly park. Parents thus double and treble parked and this, particularly with Junior and Kindergarten age children, who are less likely to use buses due to their young age, running all over the place, were "accidents waiting to happen". The recommendation was that we should split parking so staff parked in one area leaving the original main car park free for parents and school visitor use. In addition both car parks should feature speed calming measures, disabled facilities, safe and clear regulatory markings and plenty of bicycle parking. The most obvious place to put a second car park was/is adjacent to the insurance building that employs 130 local people. The original intention and an intention we still wish to activate, is for access to the car park to be by an internal perimeter road, properly and legitimately constructed.

The current size of the original car park has remained unchanged for 17 years so it is hardly surprising that over that period due to all that has occurred on the Estate and the growth of the College and the natural growth of the insurance business - originally employing 8 people 30 years ago to now employing 130 local people all living in local villages - that there is a need to reorganise the parking arrangements. Please note the car park short lighting columns are as recommended by Harrogate Council. They fulfil the need for being 100% eco-friendly and totally non-light polluting, In fact we were so impressed with them when we saw them in operation that we immediately replaced the old orange street light type lighting in our original car park with these new much more acceptable light heads.

The College of course has pressure points in the year when a disproportionately high number of people all need to park at the same time. Such times are the beginning and end of terms and half terms, speech days and parents function days such as nativity plays and the like. At such times the Estate has the need to park something in the order of 400 more cars than normal and to try and rely on the original single car park is neither practical nor safe.

Coach & Horse Box Parking
The more of our pupils travel to and from school by Coach the less cars there are on local roads. Twenty years ago we were able to operate the school bus service using Transit 15 seater mini-buses. As the number of local parents choosing the College for education of their children has grown, so to has the need for bigger coaches. Currently we are now using outside contractors who provide the bigger coaches needed. However our current car park is not safe for the regular entry, parking and exit of full sized coaches. We therefore wish to create a stand alone coach park where there is plenty of room for these sized vehicles to enter the Estate, safely park up and again leave with no problems.

Our simple yet practical design will mean children can get on and off the various coaches without having to walk into the line of cars coming and going We have designed our intended coach park to enable children to step out of the coach and go straight onto a walkway. Using coaches is part of our sustainable travel plan. It is much more eco-friendly than dozens of big 4x4’s trundling about. We also believe it is safer to provide proper parking for horse boxes that come and go at the beginning and end of half term and term time. This parking needs to be kept away from cars and small children for obvious safety reasons. Around 50-60 children bring a horse to school receiving free livery.