SB 4152 Web

In my opinion
The challenge of the conversion
The Conservative Government has an ambitious programme to open over 600 new Free Schools by 2020 and has established
the LocatED property company, to secure the sites across the UK. Nicolas Maari, Head of Architecture at Pellings, thinks that
whilst this is laudable, the quality of children’s education should not be compromised in the rush to provide for increased
pupil numbers.
The dilemma is that in built up
urban areas there aren’t the
large tracts of land available
to build the schools that tick all the
quality criteria. Multi Academy
School Trusts are therefore
sometimes being requested to
use existing buildings – old
office blocks, factories or
hospitals, perhaps.
The main issue with converting
these buildings to schools is on space
standards and the clustering of year
groups, which wherever possible shouldn’t
be compromised for the sake of the children’s
education/teaching.
So, for example, if there is a school with a
two-form entry in one year then ideally one
wants to group those year groups as well as
ancillary accommodation. This often proves
difficult within a building conversion.
Having previously worked on projects where
schools were accommodated in multi-storey
office buildings, issues we came up against
were fitting the ancillary space to service the
year groups. In that instance we had to
consider splitting the year groups as well as
staggering playtimes and lunches. This in
turn would affect the operation of the school.
In addition, it is difficult to achieve the same
efficiencies in spaces and operation that are
possible in building a new school from
scratch. Adapting buildings previously used
as residential accommodation may result in
schools being single aspect with corridors
taking up space on external walls. This
typically would be mitigated when
developing a new build school in order to
obtain efficiencies in the useable area.
of the age of the
building and its
low ceilings. The
minimum
requirement
should be at
least 2.7
metres clear
to get the
light to the
back of the
classroom and
meet Building
Bulletin regulations.
This was not possible in
this building, and as such this building which
was earmarked for conversion to a school
needed to be demolished, which significantly
affected the programme of delivering this free
school. This requirement is typically very
difficult to achieve when converting a
residential building into a school. This,
however, is more achievable in office building
conversions.
Nicolas Maari
Dealing with buildings with totally different
types of structure can be a challenge. What if
there are structural columns in the middle of
classrooms? To remove these to achieve clear
classroom/studio and hall spaces could be
very costly to alter, and perhaps life cycle
costs can be just as expensive as building a
new school.
Managing buildings and spaces are more
complex with existing buildings. In an urban
area where the only option is to have a rooftop
playground then there is the logistics
issue of staggering play-time and supervising
it.
Controversially, The Education Skills Funding
Authority has moved away from the hard and
fast ethos of providing play spaces on-site. It
used to be very strict but is now more flexible
in a priority classification, and where
unavoidable is prepared to allow provision of
off-site play areas.
Many educationalists would argue that in
terms of well-being it is important for city
children to have external play space.
However, because of the number of pupil
places required this seems to no longer be a
priority, although arguably this is to the
detriment of the wellbeing of the pupils.
Flexibility is now the name of the game and
politically the pressure is on for the existing
administration to deliver the school places. In
the days when Local Education Authorities
were setting minimum standards it was clear
what had to be delivered. With academies it is
less clear and it is down to the professional
advisors to work with the academy providers
to recognise the importance of those
standards.
www.pellings.co.uk
The previous use of the building needs to be
considered from the outset before embarking
on converting it to a school building. We have
found, for example, that invariably, the
acoustics don’t meet the needs of the school
use, and with constrained window sizes the
natural lighting in an existing building is often
not adequate for school use.
This was the case with an old manor building
which I was previously involved in. The floor
to ceiling heights were constrained because
Winter 2018 4152 27