A school in Swindon is making redundancies, it has confirmed.

Goddard Park Community Primary School in Park North has confirmed several staff will be laid off amid "nationwide financial challenges".

The exact number of job cuts is unknown.

But some staff at the school have raised concerns it will negatively affect pupils.

Staff at Goddard Park were reportedly informed about job losses last month.

Now, the school's executive headteacher, Mike Welsh, has confirmed the news that there will be a reduction.

The head of the school blamed the current economic climate and a lack of support from the current Conservative government as being responsible for the need for this decision. 

He said: "There are nationwide financial challenges in all schools and there is a general lack of government funding even for flourishing schools such as Goddard Park, which Ofsted recently identified, once again, as a Good school.

"This issue is not unique to this school and many schools are having to take action.

"It is intended that the reduction will be dealt with by the natural ending of fixed-term contracts and also some voluntary redundancies."

However, staff at the school have expressed their concern that this will ultimately negatively impact pupils. 

One, who wished to remain anonymous, said: "Many of the pupils at this school are already disadvantaged socially - some come from homes where parents are illiterate - so education is essential for them to escape the cycle of deprivation. 

"A proportion of the pupils would have been in special schools where they could have received the support they needed - those schools no longer exist, so not only do these pupils not get their needs met, the others' education is adversely affected because the teachers are required to teach across a wide range of abilities - so everyone loses. 

"Letting hard-working members of staff go without filling their positions is only going to make this worse."

Teachers claim the situation in schools in Swindon is getting worse, with many who joined in on strike action last year sharing some of the realities the town's schoolchildren were facing because of poor funding. 

One said: "We've not had a proper science teacher in our school for years, we do our best at teaching it, but I often think about how much that will affect the children."

Another said: "Our budget at the moment for paper is £10 a term, which is hardly anything. We didn't have any budget for books at the start of term so we went weeks without using any books."