A SCHOOL which was closed down last month with its buildings needing nearly £3million-worth of work to bring them up to scratch, has appeared on spareroom.co.uk as part of a flat share arrangement.

Coln House School was officially closed down on Friday, March 31 by Gloucestershire County Council (GCC), though all pupils had been removed in July.

Concerns about the safety of pupils and the standard of the buildings, as well as a lack of funds for the school were cited as the main reasons for the closure.

However, an eagle-eyed Standard reader spotted an advert for a £300-a-month ‘large double room’ on spareroom.co.uk last week.

“Interesting find regarding Coln House,” he wrote in an email. “Obviously closed as unsafe but yesterday the building was advertised as a flat share.”

In response, Neil Corbett, head of property services at GCC, said: “The council often uses live-in guardians to keep vacant properties secure and that’s what we are doing at Coln House.

“We use a specialist company that arrange and manage guardianships for us.”

At a Fairford Town Council (FTC) meeting last month, assistant clerk Roz Capps said the county council “has reported that once the building is officially closed at the end of this month, the plan is to get guardians to live in the building”.

She said the guardians will “keep it secure and ticking over”.

However, the advert appears simply as a flat share with a shared living room for a ‘professional’ occupant above the age of 23.

At the same town council meeting on March 14, chairman Cllr Trevor Hing said FTC are “considering whether we designate as a local asset the [school] playing field”.

Cllr Ray Theodoulou, GCC deputy leader, said any plans to have the field designated as “green open space” would “have my full support”.

“I will fight over the bodies of people wanting to do anything else with that field that we all know is used so well by local people,” he said.

“But there is no proposal to do anything with it at the moment. No planning application, no interplay, no discussions have taken place about the field.

“There have been one or two proposals that have been made about the buildings, which are quite separate.

“But the field, I think that is something we die in a ditch over, but there's nothing to die over yet,” he added.