SO Highfield Library has closed.

Save Bolton Library Campaign (SBLC) continues to oppose the closure, and we await a response to our submission to the Department for Media, Culture and Sport.

We oppose all the proposed library closures; in the case of Highfield there are particularly compelling reasons.

Highfield Library serves one of the most socio-economically deprived areas in the country.

The latest report, in January, showed that 20.9 per cent of children across the UK live in poverty; in Harper Green Ward, where Highfield is located, the figure is 33pc.

The Orchards Federation was opened to great fanfare in 2006; a purpose-built integrated setting, bringing together St Germain’s Nursery, Cherry Tree School, Greenfold Special School with Highfield Library and a Children’s Centre forming part of Lower Orchards. It was praised as a first of its kind by the Schools Minister in 2009.

The library is located in the middle of the school and has played a central role in children’s learning programmes.

The library staff have been heavily involved in language strategies and have been very much part of the school, sharing the same staffroom.

Typically, children entering the school are developmentally below the national average and literacy work is key to future progress.The current literacy strategy will be inevitably undermined without the library.

Adult learning courses have also been destroyed. The combined impact on disadvantaged children and parents must surely have a multiplier effect on literacy levels.

For years, every national and local report has placed improvement in literacy at the centre of all economic and social improvement, yet Bolton Council has made no attempt to address the consequences of closing Highfield Library on the Orchard school population.

Another glaring disadvantage attached to the closure is the existence of a purpose-built empty library in the centre of the building with no plan for its use. The library is an economic negative on the council balance sheet and it is hard to imagine any future use compatible with the aims of The Orchards.

So we now have a situation where a flagship project has had its heart ripped out with no regard to the long-term educational needs of the children served and a very doubtful financial saving. It would be interesting to hear the council address these concerns. There has been no discussion and the school issues have been ignored.

Is it too late for sense to prevail, or do we have to wait for Government intervention?

Tom Hanley Chair SBLC