October 2010

It’s not always the case, but sometimes a glass ceiling can be a positive thing. Especially when it’s designed by students and is a quite literal roof to their £30 million new school facilities.

At Filton High School, now renamed Abbeywood Community School, BAM asked a group of pupils to work a stained glass artist on designs for the panels to incorporate into their stunning atrium, covering the dining room area.

They took their theme as the school's values, such as respect and responsibility, and put their ideas to the rest of the school. Their choices were printed digitally onto transparent film and stuck on the underside of the atrium glass. The students involved in the project were then invited into the building when we put the panels into place. It’s a permanent signpost of their achievement.

In Somerset, you could say we have gone a step further in working with pupils, although we have not even started building. Our contract includes the design and procurement of classroom furnishing and procurement. We invited six groups of Year7 and Year 8 students to an event where they could try out the classrooms and the equipment and create their ideal working classroom. It allowed them not only to see and use the proposed furniture and equipment but also, for us to use this on other occasions. The pupils became our ‘design consultants’. We asked them for feedback on desks, chairs, whiteboard tables, and other furniture, and they told us about durability, usability, comfort and appeal.

Then we moved onto the big stuff. The students were put into two groups and asked to design their own classroom. This showed us what the students looked for in their perfect working environment – and they wanted chill-out areas, quiet study areas and desks to aid group working. This gave us insight into how the equipment would be used.

You can’t involve very young pupils in designing schools, but older ones can gain a genuine sense of excitement, engagement and pride from the opportunity to influence the end result. And not only that, but to influence the nature of our involvement as contractors. At Exeter University, for example, BAM is delivering their new Business School. Student satisfaction is at the heart of the University’s reputation, and our approach was to host workshops for the students with the project managers to explore the issues, challenges and communication around our work. That has led to good systems for informing them about the development of their new facilities, and minimising disruption and nuisance.  It makes them safer, too.

Anything we can do for those whose schools we are building, we can export in a smaller way to others who are our neighbours. In Cambridgeshire, we’re not building a school, but down the road from our Laboratory of Molecular Biology site, we’ve offered to build a nature garden for St Philip’s Primary School. We’re starting this month with a presentation of how building can affect the environment and wildlife and we’ll host a design competition for Year 3 and 4 students (aged 7-9) to create the garden. Sounds hard? Well, that’s where modern technology helps. We’ll create a set of menu options and a template – hedgerow, insect hotels, log piles, ponds, homes for bids, bats, hedgehogs, etc. In putting their gardens together, pupils will become mini landscape architects and learn about the issues involved and the skills it takes. There will be a winner, we will build the nature garden, but everybody benefits.

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