Solar panels for schools across Greater Manchester

The school estate in Greater Manchester

Greater Manchester has 1,126 open state-funded schools and colleges teaching 456,254 pupils, spread across 10 local authorities. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

Of those, 864 primary, 176 secondary, 66 special and 20 further education. The phase mix is what sets the usable roof area across a county: secondary sites and colleges carry the sports halls, dining blocks and flat roofs, while primaries offer a hall and a teaching block each and suit arrays sized to the base load.

School rooftop solar and what a Greater Manchester roof models

Modelled yield is not flat across Greater Manchester. Wigan comes out at 828 kWh per kWp a year against 769 at Ashton-under-Lyne, a spread of 59 kWh per kWp. On a 220 kWp school array that difference is about 12,980 kWh a year, which is worth checking before anyone accepts a county-wide saving figure. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2.

Every town page below carries the same arithmetic for that town, including the share of the year that lands in July and August, which is the number a governing body should see before a saving figure.

Solar PV for academy trusts on the Greater Manchester planning record

The Renewable Energy Planning Database records 3 school and college solar schemes in Greater Manchester, across 3 of the towns we cover. They include Co Op Academy Belle Vue, Hyde Road at Manchester, The Albion Academy, London Street at Salford and Tameside College, Beaufort Road at Ashton-under-Lyne. The median array applied for is 220 kWp.

We were not involved in any of those schemes. They are public planning records, and they are here because what a local authority and a network operator have already accepted for one school is the best available guide to what they will accept for the next. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Connections across the county run through Electricity North West. Anything above 3.68 kW per phase needs a G99 application, and on a school site the incoming supply and the size of the existing main switchboard are often the real constraint rather than the roof.