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Construction underway on new school in Tower Hamlets
The St Paul’s Way Community School’s design raises educational aspirations by creating easily identifiable spaces inside and outside the school, resulting in legible flexible learning environments and a high quality public realm. A series of ‘houses’ provide successive centres of excellence, by providing dynamic social and educational spaces allowing for an exciting progression of learning and experience as one moves through the school.
SPW bold architecture and unique internal spaces are designed and delivered within a very modest budget with the BSF framework. The design demonstrates how a school can become a true civic building through offering shared use of the library, sports facility and theatre to the local community.
SPW is an innovative educational building based around 5 ‘houses’ and central atriums – which form the heart of each ‘house’. The diagram is an architectonic expression of the educational curriculum the school is adopting. Each house is related to a subject: create, connect, explore, express and discover. This diagram also offers flexibility should the curriculum change in the future to a year based structure.
Within each atrium space sits a feature classroom to give identity to each house, within this area the school can demonstrate its best working practices and exhibit the work produced - turning the whole school into a gallery of achievements. The layout offers a range of learning areas from standard classrooms to integrated multifunctional teaching areas as well as corridor free layouts encouraging passive supervision at all times. Large industrial sliding doors allow the open spaces to be tuneable to different teaching styles and subjects, offering a high degree of flexibility in the school’s approach to learning methods. Each atrium also allows for digital projection technology to beam in lessons from around the world offering a new and exciting experience to the pupils.
The design offers exemplary sustainability credentials and has achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating and 60% carbon reduction compared to typical modern building.
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