Southfield Primary School
Innovative classroom design supports
personalised learning and better educational
outcomes
An EC Harris led team completed a ‘Changing Rooms’ type makeover
in Southfield Primary School in Ealing as part of National School
Environments Week.
The project was extensively covered on BBC Breakfast culminating
on the handover on Friday, June 27 2008. The makeover saw three key
areas of Southfield Primary School transformed in a five day
project to show how educational spaces can be changed to provide
improved learning and teaching opportunities for pupils and staff.
The EC Harris team worked with Alexi Marmot Associates (AMA) an
architectural practice with special expertise in educational and
work-space planning transformed the art room in this 100 year old
building into an exciting multi-use learning space with an ICT-rich
mezzanine floor using the latest thin client technology.
Creating Solutions
The aim was to show that even the most unlikely space can be
transformed with imagination into one in which teachers and
children can enjoy learning. Not every school can have the luxury
of a new-built environment and his project is a showcase for what a
low-cost intervention can achieve. EC Harris was a founder member
of the British Council for School Environments (BCSE) in 2003 and
welcomed this opportunity to support their commitment to creating
exciting learning environments.
Although all the work and equipment on the Southfield project
was free a detailed costing and programme model will be made
available for other schools as part of the upcoming Ealing Primary
Capital Programme, and elsewhere. This is an example of our ability
to create better learning environments more cost effectively.
EC Harris were responding to an invitation from BCSE to work on
the Southfield makeover, and after an initial meeting on May 16th
and subsequent consultation with pupils and school staff, the team
produced a detailed design. The Wilmot Dixon construction team
built this off-site and then re-assembled within 3 days, minimising
impact on school life. A 20% increase in floor space was created
and the second phase was turning this into an ICT-rich area with
full access to all school resources. Southfield’s concern with
sustainability required doing this with minimal increases in power
usage, no heat output or environmental while maximising the impact
on teaching and learning - hence the thin client solution.
The mezzanine is large enough for small group and collaborative
working, and both pupils and teachers were excited at the potential
of the new Art room to support new methods of working with learning
spaces that reflect the different ways children like to learn.
Adding Value
This project showed that the ‘one size fits all’ model simply
does not work. Personalised learning means helping children learn
in the way that best helps them do well. The old art room was a
space typical of thousands of classrooms, and our challenge was to
make it work for today’s children, so it can accommodate ‘formal’
instruction, small group work, collaboration, individualised
teaching, and of course effective use of ICT.
Additional work in the Art room, aside from redecorating,
included the installation of an interactive white board, supplied
and fitted by Steljes, and suspended acoustic panels which removed
the echo which had blighted classes since 1906.
The EC Harris Team was supported by the generosity of Novus
Technology who are leading proponents of sustainable computing
solutions, Modular Cabling Systems who resolved the problems of
connectivity, and Hewlett Packard, Citrix, Microsoft and
Computacenter Distribution, all of whom contributed resources to
this project.
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