BEACON Junior and Infant schools are to be left out of a £3.1 million project to improve sports and arts facilities at six Cornish primaries.

The decision to exclude the schools was confirmed on Monday, following a meeting between county education chiefs and the director of Sport England South West, the national lottery scheme behind the project.

The announcement was greeted this week with huge disappointment from the schools concerned.

Gerald Chin-Quee, a former chairman of governors at Beacon Infant School, said he could not understand why they had been left out.

He said: "It's a crying shame and a huge disappointment. An awful lot of work went into our bid - we went to sports clinics with Sport England and had numerous meetings with officers from Cornwall county council and architects, and there was an awful lot of consultation.

"I was told that one of the reasons the bid failed was because of a lack of consultation, but we had questionnaires from the parents, and pupils were given the chance to air what they wanted. Links were also being developed with the art college in Falmouth."

Mr Chin-Quee added that the schools had never gone looking for grants from Sport England - the organisation had come to them offering the opportunity to bid for new facilities.

"Now there's a lot of people who are very disappointed that would not have been disappointed if Sport England had not offered them this chance," he said.

Doris Ansari, Cornwall county council's executive member for lifelong learning, said: "We tried our best to obtain additional funding to enable all eight schemes to go ahead, but this was not successful."

Cornwall county council was allocated the huge grant last year to upgrade facilities in the county's primary schools, and had originally intended to divide the cash among eight schools.

But increases in construction costs and changes to the designs required by Sport England meant that, in the end, the grant could only fund six schemes.

Following a meeting between Mrs Ansari, Jonathan Harris, the director of arts, education and libraries, and the director of Sport England, it was decided that the two Beacon schools - which serve one of the most deprived areas in the county - were to be excluded from the scheme in favour of other schools.