SCHOOL DESIGN 119
Nowhere is the need to tailor educational building design to the pupils’ needs and aspirations more acute than in the design of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) schools. Wayne Head, director of Curl la Tourelle Head Architecture, was behind the much-praised Alfreton Park School, in Derbyshire, winner of the Civic Trust Special Award for Education, ‘presented to an exemplar education building which inspires creativity, independence, and
a love of learning’ and the RIBA East Midlands Building of the Year, putting it in under consideration for an RIBA National Award, which it went on to win. ‘We were very pleased to be shortlisted, not because of our egos but because we want to improve standards of school design for this user group – we’d like this level of design to be the standard,’ says Head. He feels fortunate that the local authority was so supportive: ‘Te brief we were given from Derbyshire was
Far left
Thornhill Primary School, Islington
A new library at Thornhill Primary School in Islington was designed with help from the children – all 400 pupils built a dream library model in a shoebox, with some of the resulting ideas being integrated into the final design.
Client Thornhill Primary School
Structural engineer Martin Redstone Associates
Contractor Woodside Contracts + Hub Workshop Left
Berendo Middle School, Los Angeles
Some school design principles are universal, including the importance of access to nature, areas for casual socialising, and spaces that inspire physical activity, all of which have been shown to improve cognitive performance in the classroom. At Berendo Middle School, a new gym was combined with interesting green spaces, including a community plaza with native landscape, to promote student wellness.
Architect CO Architects
Client Los Angeles Unified School District
inspirational and aspirational around the ethereal brief – they didn’t need to be convinced that this building was going beyond the essentials of the technical bulletin brief, and would have some fun and exciting aspects. Tey wanted architectural inventiveness, something more exciting and with friendly, social space. It was done on the normal budget; it just took a little bit of extra thought around areas of the specification.’ After pupils moved into the new school, headteacher, Josie O’Donnell, noted: ‘We have had a reduction in behaviour incidents, we see an improvement in communication from the pupils and generally… pupils are happier.’
Wayne Head has travelled extensively in Denmark and Sweden, and found inspiration in the very open school buildings there. ‘A looser plan with slip atria works very well all over Scandinavia. In the UK, some schools put the sports hall at the centre of the plan so pupils are always circulating around it, which sets up a strange energy and feels very enclosed. It’s important to design out the aggro in schools – you don’t want large groups of pupils colliding with one another on stairs or in corridors. I visited one school with lots of enclosed stairwells where they had to have a teacher on every staircase at break, which wasted a huge amount of staff time. At Alfreton Park we were trying to loosen the plan so it’s not a formal block with four wings. We made the entrance and arrival space like a little cottage so the children aren’t overwhelmed when they get there. We had a highly complex user group but we saw this as an opportunity – for example, the trampolining and music rooms are not hidden away at the back somewhere, they are at the centre of the plan.’
Zane Putne, SEND director at Noviun Architects, which has delivered over 500 schools, including 50 SEND schools, adds: ‘It’s great when architects are allowed the creativity to problem-solve. Cohorts change a lot with SEND schools so designs need flexibility, but some needs don’t change, like strong wayfinding, nature, staff health and well-being, and the need to be calming, secure and welcoming. Every detail matters, surfaces need to be natural and tactile, and you need spaces where pupils can burn off energy. I don’t think that making all schools completely the same would be a good solution.’ Where architects have been allowed to not only meet with teachers, but work with children as well, the results can be exciting. Jan Kattein, director of Jan Kattein Architects, recently worked on a new library at Tornhill Primary School. ‘We wanted children’s imagination to guide the design process, so we asked each of them to make a scale model of their dream library. Tis collective effort resulted in nearly 400 shoebox-sized submissions which defined the design brief. Tornhill Primary School now has a new library, but it also has a generation of budding architects and a tightly knit community who
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