of schedule, as well as achieving a perfect 45/45 score under the Considerate Constructors Scheme (CCS), with a nomination for a CCS award. Delivering the project alongside an existing school required careful management of access, noise and construction activity to minimise disruption and ensure pupil and staff safety. Creating a significant proportion of the school in a controlled manufacturing environment meant elements of the building could be produced with greater consistency before arriving on site, reducing the volume of work and disruption during the construction phase itself.
SEND schools require environments that respond to individual needs, and that shaped the brief at Wembley Manor as much as the delivery method. The design had to accommodate specialist teaching and learning alongside spaces supporting wellbeing, independence and different sensory requirements: bright, adaptable classrooms sit alongside therapy spaces, sensory rooms and areas for practical, life-skills-based learning. That combination depends on early
collaboration between architects, educators and construction teams. The earlier these disciplines work together, the greater the opportunity to ensure a building is both fit for purpose and capable of being manufactured and assembled efficiently.
“The key lesson from Wembley Manor is the importance of bringing educators, designers and delivery teams together from the outset,” explains Richard Thompson, Senior Project Manager at Reds10. “Early collaboration allowed us to respond to pupils’ specific needs, creating a building that could be manufactured and assembled efficiently.” Design for Manufacture and Assembly
(DfMA) is the mechanism that allows teams to assess how a building will perform while also working out how its individual elements can be produced, transported and installed. Used this way, industrialised construction doesn’t have to mean a standardised building but can accommodate specialist design features that are fit for purpose – an approach that shaped the delivery of Wembley Manor. “Our design team worked with shared
3D computer models to achieve a fully coordinated design across all disciplines, prior to manufacture,” says Richard Addenbrook, Managing Director, Sense of Space. “This is an essential requirement for offsite manufacturing and places greater requirements for the design to be fully realised and coordinated at an early stage in the overall process. The end result is testament to the collaborative process undertaken by all parties who contributed to the design.” Efficiency at Wembley Manor was also
weighed against long-term performance. The school was designed to achieve
BREEAM Outstanding, with a design-stage score of 98.9 – one of the higher scores recorded for a SEND school in the UK. Greater control over manufacturing helped manage materials and reduce waste, while decisions made early in the design process shaped the building’s energy performance and its wider environmental footprint. For local authorities under pressure to expand SEND capacity, that combination of faster, more predictable delivery alongside a high sustainability rating is increasingly attractive; demonstrating that speed does not have to come at the expense of quality. Wembley Manor isn’t an isolated example either, with Reds10 currently delivering more than £45m of school-build projects under the Department for Education’s £3bn Off-site Schools Framework. This wider government push toward modern methods of construction across the education pipeline over the next four years suggests the approach used at Wembley Manor could become a repeatable model for SEND delivery nationally, not just a one-off. And as the approach is applied across
different sites, budgets and pupil needs, the DfE framework’s rollout provides an opportunity to build on lessons from Wembley Manor, which has demonstrated how industrialised construction can help expand SEND capacity while maintaining high standards of quality, sustainability and pupil-centred design.
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