The head teacher of a Bradford primary school which is set to expand sharply says she welcomes the move.

Iqra Community Primary School, Manningham, is set to open six additional classrooms and a nursery at the beginning of next year after being told by the local authority it needed to expand from a two-form entry to a three-form entry through all year groups, The move is to accommodate the district’s rise in pupils.

Head teacher Shahnaz Anwar-Bleem said the authority was due to pay for the expansion, but the building work would have been done in phases which would have lasted about four years.

To avoid disruption the school agreed with the authority to contribute part of its own budget to the project, which has resulted in the work starting. It is due to be completed in January.

Mrs Anwar-Bleem said: “We discussed it in the governing body and decided that it would be sensible to contribute our school’s money into this so the work could be completed in one phase, and that was primarily to reduce the distraction caused by the construction work and settle the school as quickly as possible.

“Hopefully it’s going to be completed by the end of January.”

Mrs Anwar-Bleem said the expansion at the school had first brought up two years ago, and only last year was the school’s money allocated to the scheme, which will see the school’s intake increase from 528 to 630 children.

The school, which was judged “outstanding” in its latest Ofsted inspection, was identified in a report to Bradford Council’s overview and scrutiny committee as holding a revenue balance of £482,258 on March 31, 2012, some 22 per cent of its budget.

The report was asking councillors to offer their views on options for a new clawback system as it claimed the current method, controversially introduced six years ago, was failing as more than £25 million remained unspent in schools’ bank accounts by the end of March this year.

Councillors on the committee, which meets tomorrow will be told only £225,000 has been returned since the policy began.

The clawback system can be activated if secondary schools keep more than five per cent of their budget unused, which rises to eight per cent for primaries. It was introduced to challenge schools to get the best use of their entire budgets and try to even out large surpluses and deficits among the district's schools.

But the report says by the end of the 2011-12 financial year, 61 schools were in breach of those ratios.

Mrs Anwar-Bleem said: “The other thing with the money is, nothing is being held from the children – obviously if the school is providing ‘outstanding’ education then children’s needs are uppermost in our minds.”