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© Timothy Soar


A case in point is Barnfield West Academy, designed and built


by Architecture PLB on a 5.3 hectare (13 acre) site to the west of Luton town centre, through a process akin to the ‘smart PFI’ idea put forward by the RIBA many moons ago. Flexibility and community appear to be its main watchwords, with an emphasis on dining at its heart – a principle that schools nutrition pioneer, Jamie Oliver, would approve of. The £26.5 million, 12,500 sq m (135,000 sq ft) GIA project,


which opened to students in April, manages to replace an old and failing 1950s school with a crisply detailed new structure organised around a central dining area, as the hub of the learn- ing community. It manages too, to include a youth centre and sports facilities, available for the local community, thereby fur- thering the support this important local amenity has garnered from its users and near neighbours. The dining area – whose centrality was an important part of


the brief set for the architects – by ‘dynamic’ former principal Rachel De Souza – leads onto three informal outside spaces and courtyards, where students can also eat or socialise on stone benches and picnic tables. The central space, which can be used for events and presentations, features a grassed courtyard over-


looked by the rest of the academy, which is arranged in the three- storey block in a pastoral fashion with five different ‘houses’. Each house has its own identity, with contemporary names like


‘Excellence’, ‘Aspire’ and ‘Integrity’. Coloured branding helps users’ orientation, and both traditional cellular rooms and IT-rich open-plan spaces are intended to allow for a flexible approach over time and across the syllabus. In practice, the academy staff are still working on how best to use these flexible, open spaces, but are learning fast. The multi-use classrooms of the past had to be all things to all


pupils, says architecture PLB director Nick Mirchandani, and represented an inefficient approach compared to the contempo- rary move of designing a range of different spaces for different activities – as office design has already shown over the last two decades or more. “One of the biggest issues for schools is that staff are used to having their own spaces,” he says. “But variety is good because it keeps the day lively, instead of having six lessons in front of you to tick off one by one.” The decision to go for a house-based, pastoral approach was a


great aid to the early design of the academy, not least in breaking up the reasonably large scale of intake – 1,450 students in all,


continued on page 19


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