Church Order resurrects Ghaxaq college plans with reduced campus size

A controversial school-building project that could gobble up over 36,000sq.m of agricultural land in Ghaxaq has been resurrected by the Dominican Order.

The proposed school campus would take up the equivalent of seven football grounds, outside development zones, with a school block at Dawret Hal Ghaxaq built over 5,000sq.m and and external and underground indoor sport facilities of 10,500sq.m. Another 4,500sq.m of agricultural land will be dedicated to an educational horticulture project, while the remaining 15,500sq.m will be dedicated to recreational space and landscaped areas.

A plan for an even larger school to also accommodate a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart over 72,000sq.m was withdrawn in 2019.

An estimated 40% of the land is tilled by farmers. 98 mature trees, including 30 over-50-year-old carob trees will be uprooted. 720 new trees will be planted in compensation.

The land was designated for the development of a school in local plans approved in 2006. But the project came back to haunt the Church hierarchy during the Zonqor controversy, when former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat rebutted criticism by Archbishop Charles Scicluna on the proposed development of a private university on a 90,000sq.m site at Zonqor Point, by referring to the Ghaxaq school plans.

While the development of a school in Ghaxaq was foreseen in local plans, the Zonqor area was already earmarked for a national park.

Replying to the Prime Minister’s accusation of double standards, the Archbishop had declared, “if there was another alternative for the school, then precious land should not be sacrificed”.

Since then the Zonqor project for the American University of Malta was downscaled to 31,000sq.m after a site in Cospicua was identified to host a substantial part of the project. But the low student intake for the project raised doubts on whether the project will ever take place.

The Dominicans want the Ghaxaq college to be a spacious alternative to Valletta’s St Albert College, which is over 70 years old and lacks sufficient room for lecture rooms, laboratories and facilities for sports and extra-curricular activities. The area would also be more accessible to families in the southern half of the island.

Over 700 boys and girls aged between 5 and 16 will attend the school. The developers say they carried a “painstaking selection exercise” with the assistance of the Planning Authority’s planning directorate to identify the area, eventually designated in the South Malta Local Plan for the specific purpose of co‐educational schools.

The college will have four, separate, two-storey blocks, consisting of an Early and Middle School, a Kindergarten, a Senior School and a childcare centre.

The project will increase traffic by a daily average of 711 new daily trips (weekends included) during the nine-month school terms.