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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.