A village school that has been targeted twice by stone thieves will be on national TV tomorrow.
Staff and pupils at Scapegoat Hill Junior and Infant School will be on The One Show on BBC1 at 7pm.
Andy Kershaw and his dog, Buster, went to the village school to find out just how bad the problem has been.
He discovered that slates were first stolen from the school’s roof on the night of May 20 and 21.
But within a day of being replaced at the start of June the thieves struck again, this time stealing far more slates and causing even worse damage.
Now the school has taken the decision to remove all the Yorkshire stone slates and are replacing them with concrete ones.
Acting headteacher Natalie Shackleton said: “I told Andy that the school was built in Victorian times and how we could point to different parts of its architecture while teaching the pupils about the Victorian era. Sadly, the new concrete roof now detracts from that.”
Andy also interviewed pupils Grace Franklin, aged nine, and Eva Collins, aged seven.
Police are still hunting the thieves.
Some of Yorkshire’s most beautiful rural areas are reporting a plague of stone thefts, with homes, schools, farms, churches and chapels all being targeted.
The situation has become so dire that police have launched a PR drive to raise awareness of the threat to their region’s heritage.
Earlier this year, Christ Church in the village of Linthwaite had to find £2,000 to replace its 200-year-old Yorkshire stone paving slabs after they were stolen. Thieves also took topping stones from the boundary walls of a farm in South Crosland that had been in place for hundreds of years.
