Staff at a Tavistock school are celebrating victory in an eight-year-long battle to replace two nursery buildings with £1.3-million state of the art premises.

Tavistock Primary and Nursery School officially took over the new building on Friday after a campaign which saw them lobbying MP Geoffrey Cox and Devon County Council education officials for nearly a decade.

The new building will replace two so-called Devon Ladies — temporary classrooms which often had an official life span of 10 years but which are thought to have been in place at the Tavistock school for at least 40.

Headteacher Lynnette Selbie said the school was delighted with the new building, which prepares youngsters aged between two and five years old for life in their primary school.

She said: ‘It will make a huge difference, because the Devon Ladies were not fit for the purpose of providing the level of nursery education we want to provide.

‘We couldn’t, for instance, give all the children outside access at the same time — it had to be done in shifts.

‘We are preparing the children for life at school and having the building which we can do that in is essential for their development.’

The school continually dipped into its resources to patch up the two temporary classrooms. That included spending thousands of pounds to replace windows in the Devon Ladies.

Mrs Selbie added: ‘Every time we had to do a repair, it was like throwing money at the old buildings.’

Staff were also facing the prospect of having to move the nursery into the main body of the school — where space is already at a premium — when the Devon Ladies finally gave up the ghost.

School business manager Sue Gawman is seeing the closing stages of a project which she bought into when she joined the school in 2012.

She said: ‘It was part of my brief to get the new building when I joined the school eight years ago.

‘We contacted everybody we could to get the new building — local councillors, Devon County Council and our MP — to try and highlight the problem,’ said Mrs Gawman, who thanked construction firm Ryearch, who worked on the building, for their help in getting the job done.