East Lancs school bosses confident designs will pass test

3:51pm Monday 21st July 2008

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DESIGNS for East Lancashire’s new schools are set to be assessed by a Government watchdog.

The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has carried out an audit of designs for 24 planned schools under Building Schools for the Future (BSF), and found that eight out of 10 are “mediocre” or “not yet good enough”, with poor site planning and gloomy classrooms.

The designs for eight new schools in Burnley and Pendle created under Lancashire County Council’s £250million BSF scheme, have not yet been reviewed, but bosses say they are confident the designs will be up to standard.

Blackburn with Darwen Council’s education bosses also said the report would be used in guidance for its £150million BSF scheme which will see three new schools built.

Those designs will not be completed until the end of next year.

CABE has been running a schools design panel supported by the Government since July 2007, aiming to help local authorities make the best choices for their BSF schools.

Out of 24 reviewed schemes that are now at planning application stage – mostly in southern England – 21 are either mediocre or not yet good enough to support educational transformation.

As part of wave one of the Government’s multi-billion pound scheme to refurbish or rebuild every secondary school in England, a number of Burnley and Pendle’s new schools were designed some years before 2007.

The first three in phase one – Burnley Campus, Pendle Vale College in Nelson, and Shuttleworth College in Padiham – will open in September, and work has started on the next three, Burnley’s Unity College and Sir John Thursby Community College and Marsden Heights Community College in Brierfield.

Andrew Bond from Catalyst Lend Lease, the county council's private sector partner for BSF, said: “We have had no approach by CABE to review any of our designs or requests for information, but we are not aware of any criticisms of the schools we are building.

“We have made enormous efforts to make our schools sustainable, I think they would more than pass the test under these criteria.”

Some of the designs seen by the CABE panel are “getting the basics wrong”, with poor site planning, and very few schemes making the most of natural daylight to improve sustainability.

The report also highlighted secluded yards which could become bullying hotspots, gloomy classrooms, and over-sized car parks.

CABE chief executive Richard Simmons said: ‘The design quality of schools reviewed by CABE so far has not been high enough.

"What we need is a design threshold to prevent bad schemes from continuing through the system."

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