Reduce, reuse, recycle

• Further resources

Reduce, reuse, recycle: Designing sustainable learning environments

Website

www.white-design.co.uk/WhiteDesign/

www.architecture.com/UseAnArchitect/FindAnArchitect/Competitions

Key challenges:

• How can we introduce the educational vision into the design of learning spaces, resources and environments?
• Can we design spaces that would give learners more choice over their preferred ways of working?
• How will we value and celebrate learning?

Overview:

Anns Grove Primary School was a Victorian building (over a hundred years old) with high windows, many level changes, poor accessibility and a leaky roof.

Ofsted said the old school structure 'constrained teaching' so a rebuild was essential. The brief from Sheffield council was specific; the size of the new school, the number of rooms required and where it should be. They also had a fixed budget for the work.

Approach:

The architects held workshops for the Head, governors, staff, parents and pupils before the design stage, to ensure that the design was appropriate.

The consultations highlighted the need for:

• A review of the capital budget consideration against long-term maintenance costs. (In this case the build would be cheaper, but in the long run there would be higher utility bills.)
• Reusing building materials where possible.
• Involving staff and students throughout the design stage.

Activities included:

Discussion of images - presenting a variety of images, not necessarily of school buildings. For example, shots of underground living to assess what participants felt was good or bad about that environment.

Describe your day - Participants were asked to describe typical days; what they did, and for how long. Once the architects had created models based on these 'days' they talked them through with the participants to ensure the redesign would work.

Consulting - with parents and pupils involved, standing at the school gates and simply asking people about their priorities.

These activities, together with the workshops, gave the architects an opportunity to maintain expectations of what could be achieved in the new build.

As the local authority had a defined idea, the budget meant that some of the proposed work, like moveable walls, had to be changed due to the cost. Yet it was still possible to use teachers' and parents' ideas about what they wanted from a teaching and learning environment.

Staying in touch

During the actual design and build phase the architects kept the stakeholders informed at key points; including giving assemblies to students to talk about health and safety regulations and minimising energy use. They also invited students to take part in "kilowatt hunts" - a fun way of finding out the energy usage of the school's appliances, with the aim of making students more environmentally aware.

The students were impressed by the fact their new school was insulated by recycled materials - predominantly denim jeans. The architects also re-used laminated timber, taken from a school in Hull that had just been knocked down, for the hall and outside space.

The consultation process for rebuilding Anns Grove primary school shows how Building Schools for the Future can successfully be used as a teaching aid.

Key points and recommendations:

• Ideally the architects would have involved staff and students in model making to gain their ideas.
• The school redesign gallery and future day activities would achieve similar results.
• A critical evaluation process at the end of the project, with published findings, would have been valuable for improving future learning spaces designs.

Anns Grove exterior Anns Grove exterior 2 Anns Grove exterior 3