Inspiring the next generation

With education, comes responsibility

Inspiring the next generationBuilding schools, and creating environments that will inspire the next generation, comes with big responsibility.Not only should design speak to the educational outcomes, it should also inherently deliver lasting quality and sustainability.Add speed into that mix, as well as the need to meet an ever-growing school places challenge, you suddenly have a comprehensive list of target outcomes that simply wouldn’t have existed a few decades ago.So, how can authorities respond to the increasing school places need, whilst also meeting this growing list of requirements?

Enter the Construction Playbook. The result of extensive collaboration between public and private sectors to build back better, faster, and greener.One such authority that has taken these principles to springboard a batch of projects that will serve as a blueprint for schemes going forward, is Essex County Council.Andrew Lawrence, one of the project sponsors at Essex, explains why these principles were integral to meeting their challenge:

Here in Essex, we have a ten-year plan. Parents want excellent schools, and it is important to ensure we can respond with the provision of excellent school places when needed. This is translated through our capital plan and delivered through our construction framework where we are able to call upon the services of a number of main contractors in a collaborative environment.

Andrew Lawrence, Essex County Council

Three major school expansions in the county - at Clacton, Colne and Sweyne – were batched together, in order to bring about efficiencies in design and construction.Using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC), each of the schemes has adopted a prefabricated modular approach to bring about even more benefits.“We looked at several perspectives, and especially considered the impact that construction work has in a live school. Modular reduced the build time on site, ensured we’d rapidly meet the new place needs in these areas, whilst improving the quality of product as well,” Andrew explains.

The first module arrival at Sweyne

Batching projects is another ‘playbook principle’ that has been used on the scheme to deliver efficiencies for the Council. Nicola Gemmell of Pick Everard – Essex’s consultants for the scheme – argues that a modular approach is pivotal for batching:

There are a lot of positives here because we can save money at the front end by repeating the design. The industry has done an excellent job for many years in refining how a school can be designed, so by bringing that standardisation across a batch of projects, like we have done here, has helped deliver cost and time efficiencies for the County Council.