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A case study of good practice in Buildings and Grounds
Bowbridge Primary School, Newark, Nottinghamshire
David Dixon, head teacher of this 480 pupil primary, was determined to put his own
sustainable principles into practice when it came to providing new build
accommodation for his school. The school is in an area where levels of deprivation
and child poverty are recorded as being amongst the highest in the country. One aim
of building an eco school on the Bowbridge estate was to demonstrate ways in which
fuel poverty can be avoided in a sustainable future.
The new school building is two storeys rather than the more usual ground floor
accommodation for schools. This helps reduce the building’s impact on the school
grounds: the children still have plenty of space outside to learn and play.
The futuristic building accommodates ten flexible learning areas for the ten classes in
years two to six as well as five group study rooms, a meeting room and a large atrium
that doubles as a teaching space. Rather than build a ‘steel framed warehouse’ the
school researched timber framed building methods. This involves a greatly reduced
use of concrete in the foundations and building pad. The wood for the frame was not
available in England and so was purchased from sustainably managed forests in
France. The children at the school had previously worked with 27 final year students
from Nottingham University School of the Built Environment to design six futuristic
buildings. Ideas the children had generated were fed into the design process for
Bowbridges’ new build school.
Rainwater is harvested from the roof of the new building to flush toilets and there is a
read out monitor where children can see just how much water the school has saved by
this approach. Ventilation of the building is by large wall grills rather than energy
hungry air conditioning.
Parts of the old school building that were dismantled were reused in the new building
and an old brick work tank became a wildlife pond. Even the new playground surface
is made from recycled car tyres and sports shoes.
The topsoil from the site of the new build has been utilised around the school grounds.
Not having to transport this off site saved one hundred lorry journeys.
Solar panels provide hot water and the school is involved in an innovative project to
fund photovoltaic panels to produce electricity using a community investment model.
Local people will be able to buy shares in the school’s PV panels and will get a return
on their investment when surplus electricity is sold to the national grid.
The school is heated by a wood pellet boiler. When the school discovered that the
pellets for this were being imported from Poland they changed the contract and started
buying this renewable fuel from a forest in Leicestershire.
The carpets for the new accommodation come from Bradford (rather than the USA,
which was one option) and contain 60% recycled materials. Organic paint was used
throughout
At the end of the building programme the temporary site road the builders had
constructed was recycled to form the bed of the school’s new netball courts. The
builders’ road itself had been constructed from 1000 tonnes of recycled stone from a
nearby road refurbishment project. This reduced the need to take fresh stone from
local quarries.
The new space is a ‘Learning Building’ as well as a ‘Building of Learning’ as it
encapsulates the school’s Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) ethos which
is a strand that runs throughout the curriculum, campus and community it serves.