RTC Safety Surfaces scoops 150 primary school contracts

Since Sport England rolled out a project to surface 600 primary school play areas, Burnley-based RTC Safety Surfaces has completed a quarter of all contracts throughout England.

In the last year, RTC completed 150 of the Primary Spaces projects made possible by Sport England grants, equating to 28,000m² of wet pour safety surfacing.

Primary Spaces is a program developed by Sport England who have invested £18m of National Lottery funding into improving primary school’s physical education.

The fund was spent on primary schools throughout England who had little or no outside space. The schools who applied for and won part of the grant could choose from a range of packages to enhance their sporting facilities by providing multi-sport areas.

The various design options all contained activity surfacing that RTC Safety Surfaces had the specialist skills to install. This activity surfacing embraced vivid designs with floor markings to create the sport areas. RTC had to hand lay the wet pour surfacing and hand cut any shapes and graphics to transform the schools’ outdoor area.

However, as the work was tendered out to specialist companies from to groundwork contractors to playground equipment companies, RTC had to use its invaluable experience and industry knowledge, collated over the last 20 years, to secure the business.

So far, RTC Safety Surfaces have been trusted by ten companies for the Primary Spaces projects, gaining six new customers who choose RTC based of their unique expertise of wet pour graphics.

Mark Wesson, sales director at RTC Safety Surfaces, said: “The Primary Spaces funding programme has been a great success not only for the schools who have received the funding, but also to the play industry as a whole. "Primary Spaces has allowed RTC Safety Surfaces Ltd to showcase our expertise of installing complex and technically demanding surfaces throughout the country. The whole team here have thoroughly enjoyed seeing hundeds of school play areas transformed to help the next generation.”