"MY SCHOOL IS LIKE A FUNFAIR"

STUDENTS and teachers from two Middlesbrough schools have teamed up with an architectural practice to create a ‘wish list’ of design ideas for their new secondary school.

Newcastle-based Space Group is in the running to become the appointed architect to design a new building for the soon to be amalgamated Hall Garth and King’s Manor school under the Council’s Building Schools for the Future project.

Hall Garth and King’s Manor schools will be amalgamated from September 2010. Earlier this year, Middlesbrough Council ran a school competition seeking proposals to run the new school. Endeavour Educational Trust was selected and a new principal, Michael Hutton, was appointed in October 2009.

The new school has a working name of Acklam Base – a new name will be chosen in 2010.

To start the design stage of the project, Space Group held a ‘design festival’ for 16 students and a selection of staff from both schools to get their thoughts on how they would like their new school to look and function.

The design festival was broken up into an afternoon session for the students and an evening sitting for the teaching staff and members of the community.

Both workshops included activities such as a ‘Wish Wall’ where the students answered the question ‘I wish my school was…’ and posted their answers onto the wall.

There was also a ‘Smiley Wall’ where they voted for their favourite examples of different school designs using smiley face stickers.

The session also included a ‘Metaphor Tree’ where the students thought of what sort of things their new school could be compared with. Some of the answers generated interesting results not immediately obvious for a school environment but no less stimulating for the architect. Examples included, ‘like a funfair’ and ‘like a funky rainbow’.

The information gained at the design festival will now be collated into a report and presented to Middlesbrough Council’s BSF Team.

Andrew Grounsell, lead architect on the project and associate director at Space Group, said: “The design festival was held as an engagement session to gain opinions and ideas on the new school design from all stakeholders. We always aim to get this community engagement from the start of any new project.

“This is obviously the very early stages of the development, but we would certainly take all design concepts into consideration and strike a happy medium between the opinions of the children and those of the teachers – which, by comparison, were very different. We will be looking to capture the idea of a funky rainbow in our design proposals.

“We were very open minded before we went into the design festival and had no pre conceptions about what everyone would have to say about the new layout and the overall look and feel. The students seized the opportunity to put their ideas forward and one of the strong themes that came across was the sense of togetherness and community spirit that they both wanted to gain from the new school.

“From Space Group’s perspective, as a firm that prides itself on creating sustainable communities that makes people’s lives better, this was a hugely rewarding day.”

The plans for the school will be developed early in 2010 and announced by the spring of 2010. The new school is due to be complete by summer of 2012.

Information on the BSF project is available on the council website, www.middlesbrough.gov.uk/bsf.