The Suthers School pupils help personalise the new school building

Pupils have made a permanent contribution to the building of their new school.

Year seven and eight pupils from The Suthers School were invited to decorate and personalise a brick by main contractor Bowmer and Kirkland to celebrate the building of their permanent school, which is due to open in September next year on Fernwood Business Park.

The bricks will be incorporated into the building and will be a legacy of the school’s first students.

Representatives of the founding students visited the construction site last week to deliver the decorated bricks, which have affirmations and inspirational quotes written on, to create their own small piece of history.

The Suthers School head, Andrew Pettit, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the end of another very successful year for The Suthers School and its founding pupils. We eagerly await the completion of our state-of-the-art facilities and this takes us another step closer.

“By writing affirmations on their bricks, our pupils are not only building their own future in a literal sense, they are also making a statement about the vital importance of optimism and self-belief.”

The Nova Education Trust will run the school, which has been paid for by the Department for Education, and will provide a secondary school education for 830 pupils aged 11 to 18.

The school will also have two full-sized football pitches, two multi-use games areas, a sheltered quadrangle landscaped courtyard, and a kitchen garden to provide students with the opportunity to ‘grow what they eat’.

The design of the site is environmentally focused, with an eco-friendly water management systems, a green corridor planted with native species between the site and the A1 and British hedgerow species and meadow grasses planted to the north and east boundaries.

Bowmer and Kirkland contracts manager, Scott Millington, said: “This was a unique way to include the children in the building of their new school and they will know that their brick will be part of the fabric of the building forever.”

The school is named after the late county councillor Martin Suthers, a champion of education who died in 2016 following a short illness.

His widow, Mrs Pippa Suthers, said: “Martin would be so proud and happy to know the children are putting their own mark on the school.

“It was a very poignant event and he would have loved to be there to see what was going on, and to have this school named in his memory is really quite something.”