Everything in the Building Schools for the Future programme seems to move at speed. Building the Michael Tippett school has taken 364 days from first breaking the ground to relocating to the new school, near Brixton, from two dilapidated sites at extreme ends of Lambeth in south London. Yet despite the pace, it has been completed to a high standard.
"What strikes me most," says headteacher Jan Stogdon, "is that you keep meeting all these workmen who can't believe you get this kind of quality for a school." Ricky Harper, the foreman, agrees: "Amazing," he says, "It blows us away. Especially at night, looking in with the lights on." At the moment, nighttime visits for Harper and his crew are the norm as work is continuing 24 hours a day to make sure everything is done for the pupils' arrival in two weeks' time.
And even though the pupils aren't yet present, they are very much in everyone's thoughts. Stogdon's biggest concern is not the work still to be done — she's confident that will be completed — but that one pupil is not coping well with the temporary placement found for the short hiatus between moving from the old buildings to the new.
"We had to have a closure," she says, "Otherwise we can't do the training for staff to do with the differences in the environment." Staff have worked hard to prepare the pupils for the change, but Stogdon is philosophical, and is anticipating confusion and anxiety as her students have quite challenging learning difficulties, some with physical and sensory impairments, others on the extreme end of the autistic spectrum. "The kids don't stop being the kids," she says, "and no one else has the expertise to be doing this. We should all be proud of what we have done."
Staff involvement
It is not just the way her staff are managing the move she is referring to, but their involvement in the process as a whole. The outcome is quite something. There are large, airy classrooms, half of which have hoists for lifting wheelchair users between seats and standing frames. Both the sports hall and drama studio have sprung floors, and the specialist facilities include a hydrotherapy pool and a specially equipped room for sensory experiences. Upstairs, the food technology room houses three full-size kitchen areas, with height-adjustable equipment including sinks and hobs, the sixth-form common room has one wall entirely of glass that looks down the main road, while the dining hall will accommodate the whole school community to eat together.
"The quality of the facilities makes a difference," says Stogdon. "What we wanted to keep was the flexibility of the building. We did a lot to make sure it could accommodate the extraordinary range of kids we have." Getting to this point has been hard work, however, even with the acknowledged support of the local BSF team and the architects and designers. "It was an incredibly tough process to get through," says Stogdon. "There are not many schools like us around, and to put the process on top of what we usually do we have had to work considerably harder. You are not building a regular school. We have had to fight our corner all the way. The pressure has been extraordinary."
The outcome, however, has been worth the effort, and reflects a key principle of everyone's throughout the process — that the quality of the building represents "the dignity and respect" that the students are entitled to.
