The schools

 

 

Knowle DGE

Knowle DGE (formerly Florence Brown Community School) is a school for students with special needs situated in the heart of Knowle West in South Bristol. It is currently located in a converted primary school with attached swimming pool and a separate building for younger students to the south of the site.

The school has some specialist facilities for Technology, Science, Art, Music and IT and has a strong focus on vocational training, catering for a very wide range of special needs. The school has gained both Healthy and Community school status, and the building is extensively used by the local community for community education, learning courses and swimming and hydrotherapy.

Vision

The design brief was for the new school to be purpose-built and to serve as an exemplar for educating students with special educational needs, particularly emotional, social and behavioural difficulties and learning and associated behavioural difficulties.

The school’s aspirations were for the new development to be a single unified site of predominantly one storey and to evoke quality, be accessible and be welcoming to the community. The school wished to emphasise its strength in business and enterprise through its vocational facilities.

Facts & figures

The project, costing £3,167.00 per square metre (m²), consists of a complete new build on the north site of the site together with retention and minor refurbishment of the existing swimming and pool, with external works of £109.00 per m² and services works of £437.00 per m².
The total area of the site is 2.5 hectares: the gross floor area of the new development will be 4350 m² with 1641 m² of internal teaching space, 627 m² of circulation areas and 214 m² provided for storage.

Design

The new school is sensitively designed to separate different age groups of students without being oppressive. It allows flexibility in relation to changing numbers of students in years, differing numbers of students per learning base, changing SEN requirements and different teaching pedagogies. It has been designed on a structural grid that allows reconfiguration of internal walls if required, to reflect potential changes in SEN area requirements.

The building is sectioned into KS2, KS3 and vocational block area, central admin and specialist teaching block, sports hall and changing and KS4 and KS5 areas. The new teaching ‘clusters’ create a variety of teaching and learning spaces, from smaller group rooms to larger personalised learning and areas for social group activities. They offer a flexible learning environment that becomes progressively more mature and ICT-focused as students progress through the school.

Generous circulation areas and separate entrances for different Key Stage pupils avoid potential for conflict, while small group rooms across the school provide spaces for quiet time, focused learning and therapy. The purpose-built vocational facilities include construction and motor vehicle workshops and vocational catering, a café and shop to sell products made by students.
The landscape proposals address the school’s aspirations for creating a diverse and stimulating environment that offers the broadest possible range of opportunities for educational use, with the flexibility to accommodate changing future demands for outside resources.

The school has a strong tradition of land-based studies work and the external site has been divided into distinct zones to reflect this. The ‘Intensive’ zone adjacent to the building is intensively used and will contain breakout space and outdoor classrooms while the ‘Extensive’ zone consists of informal or passive activities, including habitat creation and learning through landscape areas.
The vocational spaces can be made available for NVQ qualifications for the community, together with drama and hall spaces, sports hall, outdoor five-a-side artificial turf pitch and continued use of swimming facilities.

Community use

About 70% of the school grounds (all-weather pitch, playing fields and basketball courts) and approximately 40% of the school buildings (including sports hall, music, ICT and vocational learning areas) are intended to be made available for community use.

Low-impact design features

The following are utilised as far as is practicable within the new build and refurbished areas:

  • Optimised building form and orientation to maximise solar access and daylight, with effective solar protection to avoid solar overheating and glare.
  • High-efficient compact florescent luminaires and automatic lighting controls to switch off lights where not needed.
  • A high-performance thermal envelope to guarantee high levels of air tightness.
  • Passive/ natural ventilation where possible, exposed mass to provide passive cooling and avoid the need for air-conditioning and controlled mechanical ventilation (with recovery).
  • Variable speed drives in air handling units to improve part-load performance and high-efficiency fans.
  • Heat recovery in the primary ventilation air plant and centralised heating systems, with variable speed pumps to improve part load performance.
  • Separate heating zones to allow heating to be individually controlled and/or switched off when required.
  • A careful consideration of available heating options has resulted in woodchip biomass being proposed, as this technology is a renewable energy source, offers the best value for money and has the greatest potential for reducing the schools carbon emissions.
  • Percussion taps on all showers and wash hand basins and low-volume WC flushes.

Predicted energy consumption

The predicted annual electricity consumption per m² of floor area is 72kWh and predicted fossil fuel consumption per m² of floor is 40kWh. Predicted water use is 0.12 cubic metre (m3) per m² of floor area (based on 0.017 m3 per pupil per day).

Environmental, social and economic impacts

It is vital to have sound controls in place to manage common issues from construction, such as dust, noise, run-off, light pollution, hydrocarbon contamination and increased transport. Skanska construction sites operate to the highest standards of environmental good practice, but each site also has strong links with its ‘host’ school and through them, the wider community, in order to ensure that any issues or concerns arising from site operations can be resolved quickly and effectively.

Significant opportunities exist in construction to improve waste management and ’resource efficiency’. Deliveries of materials are organised to arrive ‘just in time’ wherever possible to minimise waste produced, and all waste materials are segregated and recycled wherever possible. As an example, the piling mats have been constructed from excavated material derived from site. Closed unit paint washout stations are used on the Bristol sites to prevent paint escaping into surface water run-off.

Skanska have a commitment to strengthening the local labour pool in areas where construction projects are ongoing, both in terms of numbers employed and providing training. The company have stringent targets for employing local labour on their schools projects – this figure is currently 70%. In addition, Skanska actively encourage their supply chain to offer apprenticeship schemes to young people, and regularly attend school careers fairs to promote the construction industry as a career choice.

Skanska have a longstanding partnership with Remploy who are the UK’s leading employer of disabled people. Remploy factories supply all the Bristol projects with fixed furniture and equipment, which means that the schools are contributing to social and economic sustainability for the region.