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 [...]
Posts under ‘Refurbishing schools’
Free schools – connecting the dots
The news has been full of stories about Free Schools recently. We have seen stories that concentrate on parent power and the freedom to set their own curriculum, and in contrast we have seen stories concentrating on how shops such as Woolworths and other buildings will be converted to house these schools. But what has [...]
What you may have missed in June?
It’s been a busy month in the world of school design. Amid the financial uncertainty, a number of key annual industry events took place during the month, including the BCSE Industry Awards – a great evening with a range of inspirational speakers. You can see a full list of the winners here and we’ll be [...]
Remodelling education – key lessons from history
Yesterday’s launch event of our new resource ‘The New 3Rs’ threw up some really interesting observations from the presenters about the new landscape we are working within – and some radical options for the future of schools and school design. Interestingly many of these had their roots in the history of schooling and identify a [...]
The New 3 Rs – refresh, refurb & reusing schools
We’ve just published a report entitled ‘Rethinking schools capital investment: the new 3Rs? – Refresh, refurb, reuse. We’re loading the whole thing up as a permanent section to this site and you can download it here (pdf). It has been produced in conjunction with Scott Brownrigg and Davis Langdon. The New 3Rs – refresh, refurbishment [...]
Award winning refurb
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 [...]
Every Special School Matters
Following our call for ideas – I am posting up some great case studies and discussions we had about designing special schools. As a major issue for the new government, special schools are very much here to stay – but their design and work is not always given the same profile and visibility way as [...]
Remodelling education spaces
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. [...]
Reshaping our learning landscape
We are really pleased to be working with Croydon and Kingston Council and their team (the fantastic Jo Twine and Darren Atkinson) on a series of provocation papers as part of their Building Schools for the Future programme. One of the papers is already on the DesignShare website and is written by Prakash Nair and [...]
Why wait for BSF?
Yesterday I spoke at an event entitled, ‘Why wait for BSF?’ , hosted by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. It’s early days for their work on this issue but some of the invited schools had done fantastic work. Like the BCSE’s Big School Makeover schools – these schools had not waited for permission to [...]
