Chorley Council has called for a consultation into the future of the borough’s two maintained nursery schools to be halted. Lancashire County Council, which runs the Duke Street and Highfield [Wright Street] facilities in the district, started the process earlier this month after more than a year’s delay because of the pandemic. As the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) revealed in January 2020, the authority had originally been intending to assess four out of its 24 nurseries that were deemed to be financially unviable. However, it later extended the consultation to include them all, warning that every site could become unsustainable if the government did not commit to continuing with a top-up supplementary grant for nursery schools that had previously been planned to end in March 2021.