9,000 people is nothing like enough to justify a station at their modern costs.
Then again, I question whether the associated commercial development is truly tenable given such a small number of people (let alone a secondary school and two primary schools).....
4,115 homes at 2.36 average household occupancy would be closer to 10,000 people than 9,000.
Okehampton has a population of 7,300 and justified significant works (not quite a new line) and at £40 million far more the cost of a new station.
That at the end of a line so the 300,000 passengers are only going in one direction.
Build a stain between two places and the draw might be greater.
Having said that Wareham in Dorset which has a electrical population of 9,000 has about 300,000 passenger movements at its station. (It's about 2.5 hours from London, so a similar journey time from Ashchurch.
Whilst Tewkesbury has a larger population, the distance from the station is likely to be the reason it doesn't add much to the railway in terms of passenger numbers.
For a free-standing town, 9000 people should be enough to justify a station if there is a suitable service to call there – a lot of new stations have been built recently to serve much smaller populations! – and the hourly Bristol to Worcester service looks like it would be suitable ... but if it's basically a suburb of an existing town that already has a station then that's harder to justify. In this case, good bus links to Cheltenham Spa station would be a better use of resources.
Our council planning department used to work on the basis that, on average (and obviously it depends very much on the makeup of housing involved, but assuming a mixed development) you would get 1 primary school pupil for every 5 homes, and 1 secondary school pupil for every 7 homes. On that basis, a development of 4,000 homes would typically generate about 800 primary school pupils (easily enough to warrant two new schools) and about 580 secondary school pupils (which could be enough to need a new school if existing schools in the area are already full).
Indeed.
800 is about 115 per year group at primary school, that's just about enough to have 4 forms of entry, or two schools of 2 forms per year group.
580 is just about 4 form entry for a secondary school, not an ideal size, but large enough (especially if the nearest alternative school is more than 3 miles and school transport is required, as the cost of that would be significant).
If you wanted to keep costs down you could have a single site (for example you could have one set of kitchens) as chances are you'd only be looking at a development site about 1 mile across so travel distances aren't going to be significant.
Likewise you could have a single sports hall and just stagger when it's used, just make it large enough that it can be used by 60 kids at a time. Ideally you'd use that sports hall, add in a pool and gym and other facilities to create a leisure centre where the schools and the community could access facilities as they needed them.
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