Primary school children were sent home on the first day back after half-term because of a water outage.
Barming Pre-School and Primary School, which looks after around 500 children in Belmont Close, discovered it only had a trickle of water at around 10am today.
Executive headteacher, Ashley Crittenden, said the situation has had a “huge impact” on children and parents who had to come and collect their children from school.
She explained staff discovered the toilets weren’t filling up this morning and, after carrying out some checks, found the water had gone off.
After monitoring the situation it for an hour, a difficult decision was made to close the school.
Despite this, Mrs Crittenden said the “biggest challenge” was trying to contact South East Water (SEW), as it took three hours to get through and speak with somebody.
The firm then sent an engineer to the site and staff were told problems were linked to a water leak in the Fant area.
She said: “It’s not anywhere near the school, we think ours [outage] is something completely different.”
The school went back to SEW water to query the cause and asked for someone to come back to reassess the situation.
Just after 4pm today, the water came back on but the school is yet to have an update from SEW in writing.
Mrs Crittenden says the school will keep parents informed and the site manager will arrive early to check the supply and send confirmation to parents before the start of the day.
She added: “We want to be able to open tomorrow. We have provided learning for children to complete this afternoon but it’s not the same as being in school, especially on the first day back after a half-term break.
“It impacts on families ability to work. Our parents are amazing and responded really quickly to collect their children.
“As well as the children not being in school learning, it has a huge impact on parents who either have to leave work early or make alternative arrangements, potentially losing half a day’s pay as they are not in work as they have to take time off to look after their children. It’s very inconvenient”.
It comes after 24,000 households in Tunbridge Wells were left without access to drinking water for 14 days after problems started at Pembury Treatment Works on November 29.
Then, less than a month later, on January 6, a second major water outage began, lasting until January 16, when water was finally restored to the remaining 6,500 properties that had been affected.
Mrs Crittenden added: “We pay a lot of money for our water. It’s clearly affected a lot of residents today and it’s affected an entire school with nearly 500 children.”
In a post on Facebook, MP for Maidstone and The Weald Helen Grant, said the outage was “unacceptable” and wrote to SEW as a matter of urgency to get the issues resolved.
SEW was contacted forcomment.
