The Centre for School Design » BSCE Industry Awards

Building Better Schools Conference – 9-10 November 2010 – now live

Ian Fordham — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:13:07 +0000

I am delighted to go live with this year’s BCSE Annual Conference – hosted in partnership with Manchester City Council on the 9-10 November 2010 – which will be bigger and better than ever before. With 4 big themes around the Changing Landscape – for Schools, Academies, Free schools and the Big Society – we are looking to explore, challenge and shape the vision of where the education system is going under a new government and how this will impact and shape school buldings and learning environments in the years to come. CONFERENCE FORMAT

Day one of the conference includes 5 study tours to leading schools and learning environments in Manchester and neighbouring local authorities, followed by an unmissable evening drinks and networking reception held at Manchester Town Hall.

Day two is the start of an inspiring day based uniquely within the Manchester Communication Academy. It includes an unparalleled line-up of top speakers from across the UK and internationally plus 10 interactive workshops and break out sessions – sharing the latest thinking, practice and setting the agenda for the year ahead for the sector.

A stellar line up of SPEAKERS confirmed so far include:

Lord (Jim) Knight of Weymouth, former Minister for Schools and Learners
Dale Bassett, Research Director, Reform
Sir Bruce Liddington, Director General, EACT & Principal Adviser, The New Schools Network
Lynne Heath, Principal, Manchester Communication Academy
Jo Twist, Education Commissioning Editor, Channel 4
Indy Johar, DEMOS and Respublica Associate and Director, 00:/ Architects
Mike Gibbons, Chief Executive, Richard Rose Federation and founding Director, Innovation Unit
Jon de Maria, Neighbourhood Schools Campaign, Wandsworth
Professor Peter Barrett, President, Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB), University of Salford
Representatives from Welsh Assembly Government, Scottish Government and Northern Ireland

Plus we have a number of other high profile speakers from local authorities, schools and the private sector lined up as speakers and workshop presenters – further updates will be provided in the coming weeks.

BOOKING DETAILS

We are now taking bookings for the BCSE Annual Conference:

Early bird rate (ends 30 September 2010)
£200 for schools, local government and voluntary sector (BCSE members)
£250 for private sector (BCSE members)
£450 for private sector (BCSE non-members)

Standard rate
£250 for schools and local government
£300 for private sector (BCSE members)
£500 for private sector (BCSE non-members)

To book places simply email brigid@bcse.uk.net or call the BCSE on 0207 785 6288. Note: we can now accept credit card bookings.

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
There are a range of opportunities to sponsor this conference and gain profile for your organisation with over 400 delegates at the UK’s leading education, design and construction event. Connecting with the Building Better Schools Conference is a unique way to get in touch directly with your key audience and to have the competitive edge in your organisation. For further details download the sponsorship document (Conference_sponsorship.pdf) or contact Ian Fordham, Deputy Director, BCSE at ian@bcse.uk.net or 07525 458165.

HOSTS & PARTNERS
The Building Better Schools Conference is co-hosted by the British Council for School Environments and Manchester City Council.

We are also working collaboratively with some excellent partners (see below) who are helping to spread the word about the conference through their networks. If you are interested in being a conference partner, please email ian@bcse.uk.net

What you may have missed in July?

Ian Fordham — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:02:12 +0000

Again, a month is a very long time in the current climate of educational revolution.

Click on this image to go to the 2010 Awards booklet

Looking back, it’s very hard to believe that it was less than a month ago that Michael Gove read the last rites over the BSF programme and announced the review chaired by Sebastian James.

The interim report is due in September and the final one is published in December.

Since then, we’ve already organised a number of member meetings – one in Manchester and the other in London – with over eighty people attending. These were intended to flush out questions and response and we are putting our finishing touches to now. We’ve been circulating templates that existing projects can use to feed in case studies.As Pascale Scheurer of Surface To Air Architects put it in our Centre for School Design comment thread…

“…[a] positive aspect of deregulation/competition (Academies & Free Schools) could be innovation, choice, improvement through competition and co-opetition between schools.

Potential negative = impact on children in free-market-failure schools, impact on vulnerable children and those whose choices are limited.

If the process & programme can be designed to mitigate these negatives, the innovation will be very welcome.”

The whole Free School programme has continued to grab headlines, and one of the immoveable objects that they are confronting has been the difficulty in finding suitable sites.

Much of the procurement and guidance that has been available in recent years has –as our submission to the James Review will restate – been inflexible, monolithic and lacking in creativity.

Academies and free schools need a different kind of help, and for this reason, we’ve established the Academies and Free Schools Advisory Service. This is intended to gather the combined and accumulated experience of people who have worked on hundreds of school rebuild, refurb and reuse projects and put it at the disposal of these new providers to deliver next-generation schools.

We’ve continued to emphasise the role that school environments play in education and we’ve been a bit worried by those some expressing the view that school environments have little impact on the quality of education on offer. They do.

And lastly, it’s a month since the BCSE awards, but let’s not forget that there are some great projects out there that act as an example to us all on what is possible. Have a look at the awards booklet – it’s now online here.

The Best of Britain’s Schools

Ian Fordham — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:30:59 +0000

We must remember amidst all of the challenges and difficulties presented by the last 2 weeks and the cancellation of the BSF programme that teachers, local authorities, architects, contractors and suppliers have been and are still building some world class school buildings and learning environments. So with an unashamed focus on the positive – here are details and pictures of all of the BCSE Industry Award 2010 Winners. Lets celebrate some of the best of Britain’s schools – delivered despite some of the worst of Britain’s procurement processes.

BCSE School Design Awards 2010

BCSE Industry Award Winners 2010

Ian Fordham — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:00:11 +0000

We’re still slightly reeling from the speech given by Steve Chalke tonight at the BCSE Industry Awards.

"If you're only in this business to put up buildings, you're in the wrong business."

We knew he was worth hearing – we wouldn’t have asked him to speak otherwise – but if we’d anticipated just how powerful his message was going to be … well, you’d be watching a YouTube of it instead of getting a few remembered quotes from me.

It was a tour de force that resulted in ‘our host for the evening – Kim Catcheside – grabbing the microphone and giving us a very good rendition of ‘Sweet Chariot’!

Drawing on his experience growing up in South London before founding the Oasis Trust, Steve made the point that teachers often say ‘have a good weekend’ to some of the kids they work with in the knowledge that the weekend isn’t as good or inspiring as the time that they spend in a school that is designed and managed by committed people.

He quoted Martin Luther King saying “you only know you’re truly alive when you know what you’re prepared to die for” – while picking a bone with the great man for his use of the word ‘dream’ where ‘vision’ would be a better alternative.

There’s more, and we’ll have to see if we can get Steve to reprise his performance in front of a camera some time.

And so to the awards. They are now in their third year, and they’re here to identify and reward excellence in the UK school design and construction sector. What stood out this evening was the quality of submissions across 15 categories, demonstrating the innovation and outstanding work being delivered across the public and private sector.

The judges have chosen a range of projects, individuals and teams to recognise their contribution to school design in the last year. In particular, the Big School Makeover Award for the Best Remodelled School had some fantastic projects and will be an area of great interest in the coming years.

The entries this year are a welcome opportunity to celebrate the best of Britain’s schools. In an ‘age of austerity’ the temptation may be to retreat into our shells, but this year, more than any other, we need to celebrate the world leading work of our schools, local authorities, architects, contractors, suppliers and organisations across the sector.

The strong shortlist and exciting list of winners shown in this booklet show that we have much to be proud of.

We hope that you will find these awards inspiring and both in the diversity of projects it contains and in the level of thinking that has gone into each school. We know that there are many more examples of great practice across the UK and we look forward to an even larger entry next year.

Our thanks go to the panels who judged this year’s awards and in particular to Gareth Long who chaired the entire process. We also thank our sponsors without whom the Awards would not be possible.

Inspiring Design: Schools
Clapham Manor Primary School
Forest Way School
The Pears National Centre for Autism Education

Inspiring Design: Academy
The City Academy

School Contractor of the Year
Willmott Dixon

School Architect of the Year – The Jonathan Ibikunle Award
Studio E Architects

Local Authority of the Year
Manchester City Council

Furniture, Fittings and Equipment (FF+ E) Supplier of the Year
ISIS

Sustainable School of the Year
St Luke’s CE Primary School

Best School Extension, Refurbishment or Remodel – The Big School Makeover Award
Coleridge Primary School

Best School Extension, Refurbishment or Remodel – The Big School Makeover Award
Elm Court School

Best Use of Learning Technology
RM

Best Outdoor Learning Environment
Park Campus PRU

Best Sport and Play Environment
Kirkby Sports College for Learning

Best Healthy Learning Environment
Acland Burghley School

Innovation in Student Engagement – The School Works Award
Essex County Council

Inspirational School Leader
Vonn Smith, John Perryn School

Judges Award
Clapham Manor School and dRMM Architects

Fellowship of the British Council for School Environments
Paul Morrell, OBE

We’ll be returning to a lot of these winners – along with a few of the ‘highly commended’ runners up over the coming weeks and months – please stay tuned!

Buildings that embrace the nature of learning in the 21st century

Ian Fordham — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:48:32 +0000

Money may be tight right now, but there is a huge amount that we can learn from the decisions that were made over the past decade of investment in school building capital project. In preparing for the BCSE 2010 Industry Awards tomorrow night, I was reviewing some of the 2009 winners to see how they compare.

I often hold Knowsley’s approach up as one of the best examples of a local authority responding directly to the nature of learning in the 21st century.

In a number of their BSF projects, they’ve shown a desire to prepare their schools for personalised learning while also recognising the needs of the whole child, adopting a ‘school within a school’ approach through the introduction of homebases.

Their Centres for Learning are also promoting healthier, happier and engaged children. One of the winners of the 2009 ‘Inspiring Design’ awards – Christ the King – has enhanced the quality of the learning environment for its users with the following features:

An atrium at the heart of the Centre for Learning (CfL), offering a large double height open space which can be adapted for a variety of learning, cultural and social use while also creating a magnificent welcoming light entrance.

Locally young people requested that large centres are divided into home/family groupings with Homebases. These incorporate a variety of spaces including learning studios and open breakout areas based around a ‘village square’. This accommodates a range of different learning styles.

Learning spaces are more flexible and longer opening hours allow the community to use the centre for educational, cultural and leisure use, so spaces are multifunctional to adapt to their needs.

The Learning Resource Area has replaced the traditional library and offers increased opportunities for more interactive learning through the provision of wireless technologies, IT banks and library resources.

External Terrace & Winter Garden provide opportunities for ‘indoor outdoor learning’ with a series of external terraces attached to each homebase. This has included an internal winter garden – a covered yet permeable space which enables pupils to explore sustainability and environmental learning.

A series of ‘warehouses’ deliver specialist subjects such as science, technology and the Arts.

The CfL is WiFi enabled and Knowsley has developed a virtual personalised learning environment for every student.

I recall that, when we were looking at this project during our deliberations for the 2009 awards, the Judges were impressed by Knowsley’s ability to engage a wide range of stakeholders in the development of Christ the King Centre for Learning.

This is an exciting new building that provides an imaginative and flexible range of general and specialist learning spaces designed with the 21st Century curriculum at its heart. It also provides lots of ideas that existing schools can tune into.

Award winning refurb

Ty Goddard — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:54:51 +0000

One of the most impressive refurbishments of an existing school that we’ve seen in recent years was the job that Haverstock did on the Ifield School in Gravesend, Kent. It was deservedly a joint-winner of the 2009 BCSE Awards, providing an example of how to really implement a new extension, remodel and refurbishment to an existing primary and secondary SEN school.

The building provides accommodation for 138 students with profound, severe and complex needs. Given that a student may spend their entire educational life at the school, they should have the sense of ‘progressing’ around the school. As the age of the student increases, the spaces they inhabit are designed to become more mature.

The new exterior facades were designed to provide a secure, but welcoming shell. The new canopies and rendered walls suggest entering a protected building and give shelter for minibuses dropping off wheelchair users. Once inside the building and on the pedestrian side of the fences, the building becomes softer, more transparent and sympathetic, culminating in the central soft courtyard heart of the building.

Poorly used external areas around the old building have been transformed into the new sensory courtyard. This is made of softer materials and is protective of the more vulnerable students, yet has a sense of openness. The primary students are all now given direct access from classrooms to a secure external space, essential for students of this age and nature.

The original main school block was fully and extensively refurbished. All elements were tired and/or past their useful life. The internal layout of the building was poor, including circulation through rooms, and internal level changes were unsuitable for wheelchair users. The new design eliminated all of the major design issues within the school. The hall size was doubled, a new hydrotherapy pool built and all classroom sizes were extended and circulation widths increased.

At the time, the Awards judges felt this was a fantastic example of how a special school could be updated and refreshed through thoughtful and inclusive design. The job was done allowing the school to remain open during the construction phase and the result is a building which works for all its users.

Sustainability in action

Ian Fordham — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:17:25 +0000

Bowbridge Primary in Notts was the winner of BCSE’s ‘Greening the School’ industry award in 2009. As the ‘Zero Carbon Task Force’ seems a distant memory, it is worth remembering what Bowbridge stood out for.

Wood-burning boilers at Bowbridge

The school’s staff and community were involved right from the start of this project so that the new extension could enhance the school’s place as a key part of the relatively deprived community in which it sits.

There is adult education on site, a wide wireless access and pensioner luncheon clubs amongst other community initiatives, and this plays a large part in the sustainability of the wider community.

The building’s core material is timber to minimise embodied energy. The frame is laminated and the timber floor, roof and walls are designed to be in a diaphragm to reduce material usage.

The roof covering is single ply with the rain screen being largely cedar and windows and door timber with aluminium skin on the southern windows for longer low maintenance life. Off the classrooms is a large atrium, designed as a multi-use space which contains libraries, work areas, stairs and is lit by daylight from the large windows. The area contains the rainwater harvesting and live energy consumption readouts which are also available on the school’s intranet for curriculum use.

Here’s a good article that we found on the NCSL’s Future website about Bowbridge and the ways they have involved a wide group of people in thinking through the school’s design. Insulation levels are high and the ventilation and lighting system have been made simple to use and automatic with user override.

Heating is provided by a biomass boiler using locally sourced and grown wood pellets. Water heating is firstly from roof mounted solar panels, topped up from the boiler or in summer electricity. The boiler has a window and stickers explaining the workings as part of the learning resource.

Ventilation is natural, using a computer controlled system linked to windows and dampers on the ground floor and rooflights on the first floor. The building uses rainwater harvested water to supply the toilets and taps are noncorrosive to reduce water use.

We thought that the school was an exemplar of how sustainable design could be used to further wider school and community agendas. Kudos to Nottinghamshire County Council, working in partnership with key stakeholders, has delivered a building fit for 21st century education and a symbol of efficient and effective sustainable design. Raj Arora at Notts, in particular, gave this project the kind of support that it needed.

In short, we were impressed. And it wasn’t the only great school that we looked at either. Among the many other schools that we looked at, Exwick Heights Primary School in Exeter (developed by NPS Property Consultants Ltd) was pretty impressive as well. Maybe more about that one another day?

Zero-carbon schools – early thoughts

What you may have missed in May

Ian Fordham — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:01:21 +0000

With so much to look forward to in June (National School Environments Week 18-25 June and the BCSE Industry Awards 24 June), we thought we’d make sure that you haven’t missed any of the important developments we picked up in May.

Becta have been the first high profile casualty in the education sector

It all seems so long ago now, but a month ago, we weren’t entirely sure what the political landscape around education was going to look like.

The only thing we knew for certain was that change was in the offing whatever happened and a new government would move us well beyond the status quo.

All governments inevitably end up having to defend the less attractive consequences of their policies, and new governments have plenty of low-hanging fruit to choose from when they’re looking for high-impact improvements.

As we awaited the electorate’s verdict, our eyes were upon one of the biggest obstacles that ambitious schools face – the system of procurement. We thought that the outgoing government had allowed a rigid conformity to grow up and that the system was driving out sharp new ideas. It will be interesting to see how far the concerns that we raised in this pre-election post will be addressed by the new government.

And what happened within days of the election result being known? Aside from the eye-catching Free Schools policy, a few interesting assessments had been going around about the demise of BECTA – one of the early casualties. On the wider question of funding, this quote leaped out as us:

“Anna Fazackerley – the head of education at the think tank Policy Exchange – who says that, “one part of the schools budget that is ripe for cutting is capital”. We also heard a day later from a Building Magazine article that there was a strong possibility that all BSF programmes that hadn’t reached preferred bidder stage may be frozen, pending a review in the upcoming budget

The Institute for Fiscal Studies took the view that ..

“Either they have to scale back plans for free schools or reduce building schools for the future by a substantial degree,”

We gave a more detailed early response to the first ten days of the new government in our inaugural weekly podcast. We have been asked a lot about Michael Gove’s ‘supply side revolution’ and we’re looking forward to seeing how far the ‘Free Schools’ policy will go. We’re expecting continuing investment in the workforce and in teacher professionalism. The new government are inevitably picking up on questions of waste and decentralisation – two long-signalled themes from the Conservatives.

And while all of this is going on, it is important to carry on promoting good practice in all aspects of school design, and our second weekly podcast featured an interview with world renowned ergonomics guru Dr Dieter Breithecker about his expert views on school furniture and the key messages he has for schools and professionals working in the UK. We met Dieter in preparation for the first of two of our Masterclasses on furniture. As Dieter says when we choose any furniture for children, ‘we should not buy the mistakes of history’ – we should have the same view of the education landscape as we progress through the summer term.

Remodelling education spaces

Ian Fordham — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:14:48 +0000

For obvious reasons, we’ve been getting a lot of interest around the question of school refurbishment and remodelling in recent weeks. It’s an area that we’ve covered in a number of ways over the past year or so. Our major remodelling conference in March 2009 featured some of the best case studies and presentations available in England. We also have a fantastic range of projects featured every year in our Best Remodelled School category including one of our 2009 winners, The Cloister’s Building at St Benedict’s School, Ealing designed by Buschow Henley.

You can see these pictures here (very high resolution pics are available on request) – they’re published here under a creative commons licence and you can use them as long as you attribute them by linking to this post. We are also planning a major announcement and a free event on remodelling, refurb and reuse of schools in late June – so watch this space.

When they were considering this school for the awards, I remember that the Judges felt this was a particularly beautiful design solution which carefully reflected the culture and ethos of the school and provided flexible spaces at its heart. The cloistered hall at the centre of the school adds a new dimension to the building and is now used by the whole school community to great effect. You can see all of the details by following this link but we’re going to feature a few more of the 2009 winners here on the site over the coming weeks, before announcing our 2010 award winners on 24 June.

No related posts.

BCSE Industry Awards 2010

Ian Fordham — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:39:14 +0000

The BCSE industry awards 2010 celebrate innovative and successful school design and construction sector. The UK is a world leader in this important and dynamic industry, and after a period of fast paced growth the time is now right to recognise the very best examples of what this vibrant sector can deliver.

“The 3rd annual BCSE Industry awards represent joyous celebration of achievement, integrity and independance of view. All of these are important, now, more than ever. We’ve consistently received masses of entries for these coveted prizes and they are now seen as the quality mark in school design. Winners and short-listed entries report positive benefits for their business and their reach. Don’t put a ‘mickey mouse’ on your mantlepiece or your reception desk – enter the BCSE 2010 awards” – Ty Goddard, Chief Executive, BCSE

Last year’s winners are shown in our awards book below

To enter the awards – the deadline is the end of February – please visit the BCSE website

BCSE Members Only seminar: Refresh, Refurb, Reuse & change of use?