A SCHOOL has been without internet for almost a month.

Albourne CE Primary School, in Hassocks, experienced an internet outage on September 12 and has been offline ever since.

A spokesman from the Hurst Education Trust, which the school is a part of, has hit out at Openreach for blaming the delay in resolving the outage on a number of issues including strike action, a lack of specialist engineers and equipment, the need to excavate the road and “ongoing problems with ‘nodes’ on the Openreach network”.

The spokesman said the situation has been made worse as the school has no mobile coverage so no one can access internet via their phones as a backup.

A spokeswoman from Openreach apologised for the delay and said the company hopes the outage would be resolved this week, hopefully by yesterday.

Headteacher Fiona Keeling said the outage has been a big blow for the school and praised her staff for working under such conditions.

“This month-long internet outage has had a huge impact on the school,” she said.

“Our fabulous staff have been brilliant but have had to work many additional hours to re-plan all the lessons and we cannot access many of our online systems.

“It is very frustrating that no one can provide us with any kind of resolution date. The problem seems to be continually escalated with different reasons given for no real progress being made.”

An Openreach spokeswoman said on Monday: “We’re sorry that it’s taking longer than we would like to fix the connection to Albourne Primary School. 

“The fault was reported to us in late September, since then our engineers have been working on the repair but it’s a complex problem requiring specialist engineers.  We’re hopeful it will be resolved tomorrow.”

A spokeswoman from Exa Networks, the school's internet provider, said: "We continue to work closely with Albourne Church of England Primary School in order to find a satisfactory resolution.

"We understand and share the school’s frustrations, however, as the problem lies within Openreach, we have no further information at this time."