NEARLY 10 years after The Petersfield School signed a deal with Tesco, which is reputed to have netted it £500,000 to improve facilities, a new deal is on the table with the supermarket. The l997 deal resulted in the school's state-of-the art £1.1m performing arts studio, which opened last year. The new deal could mean ambitious and far- reaching plans, which would put the school at the forefront of sport in Petersfield, as revealed by The Herald last month. Headteacher Nigel Poole has told parents he is in negotiation with Tesco to sell a parcel of land next to the Causeway store and school governors have given him the go-ahead to accept their offer. He said: "The likely total Tesco would pay the school would be somewhere between £1m and £1.5m. Obviously, this would be fantastic. However, there are two very big ifs: Tesco would need to get planning permission and the Department for Education and Science has to approve the sale of land." The school is currently preparing plans for a full- sized floodlit, multi-use sports facility that would include six new hard tennis courts, upgraded changing facilities and a new cricket pavilion. Mr Poole told parents in his letter that the Football Association had indicated that it would look favourably on an application from Petersfield for the siting of an artificial pitch at TPS and could agree to match funds up to half the cost of building a floodlit artificial pitch for pupil and community use. But he warned: "It's not a done deal. If the DfES turn us down, there is no Tesco sale. If there is no Tesco sale, there will be no sports facility upgrade, because the FA money alone wouldn't be enough. "If Tesco don't get planning permission (to expand their existing store), there is no deal, because they won't need the land and again this will mean that we can't upgrade our sports facilities." He said Tesco wanted to buy strips of TPS land at the back of their store and some of the school's "dead" land, which adjoined their current entry road at the bottom of the TPS cricket field near the mini roundabout. "From a TPS point of view, it will reduce our green space by only a small amount and we can re-site the soccer pitch further along the 'bottom field.' Mr Poole told parents he wanted to know their views on the proposals and would be displaying Tesco's ideas in the school foyer. He urged them to write to him saying how they felt about the proposal to sell off a small parcel of land and use the funding to upgrade the school's sports facilities. This week, the corporate affairs manager for Tesco, Felix Gummer, told The Herald: "At the moment, we are still in negotiation, hence the letter asking for consultation with the parents. But we are extremely excited about the possibility of increasing our commitment and engagement with The Petersfield School and the Petersfield sporting community." He said it was hoped to use the TPS land to improve the Causeway Tesco site, but it was still very early in the process. In l997, TPS signed a contract with Tesco which was reputed to have given the school around £500,000 in exchange for the land for the footpath that created a vital link to the town centre.
