DESPITE its aging and dilapidated buildings, educational outcomes at Hexham’s Queen Elizabeth High School place it among the best state schools in the North-East.

But with 151 surplus places and costly buildings to maintain, the school reported a budget deficit of more than £94,000 in 2015/16.

And with six-figure annual losses reported at Haydon Bridge High School, leaders at Queen Elizabeth High and Hexham Middle Schools, which united under the multi-academy Hadrian Learning Trust last year, have indicated they would not take on the “financial or educational risks” of running Haydon Bridge.

The information came to light this week within a report published by Northumberland County Council on education in the west of the county.

The document, which proposes a wider consultation on the best way forward for many of Tynedale’s schools, was compiled by the county council’s interim director of children’s services, Andrew Johnson.

“The trust would, however, be willing to look at ways of subsuming the pupils into their existing cohort, depending on the requirement to provide additional physical resources,” Mr Johnson wrote.

The document added that 239 of the 1,256 pupils currently on the roll at Queen Elizabeth live in the Haydon Bridge catchment – a figure which has nearly doubled in the last three years.

The Hadrian Learning Trust board completed a consultation on switching to a two-tier structure in July, with feedback on the creation of a single 11 to 18 secondary school from September 2019 collected from members of the Hexham Partnership of Schools, parents, and other sections of the local community.

However, the outcome of that consultation has yet to be made public.

And aside from welcoming the idea of a wider consultation on education, the trust’s executive headteacher, Graeme Atkins, has remained tight-lipped over his hopes for the future.

“We’re still going through the process of digesting the county council’s report and considering the trust board’s response to our initial consultation on age range change in the light of this,” he said this week.

He added that he felt it would be premature to comment further on the report or proposed consultation on education at this stage.