Description

The Jo Richardson Community School is a new 1,500 place secondary school at Castle Green in Dagenham, one of the most deprived communities in greater London. The new facilities are one of the first authentic ‘full service extended schools’ in the UK. The brief includes a public library, a sports centre, a performing arts suite, ICT and adult education facilities. There is also the provision of vocational courses within the new school including engineering, plumbing, electrical installation, painting, decorating and catering. As part of the early development work, the local education authority commissioned an ‘exemplar’ scheme to be worked up prior to the formal appointment of the architect. This entailed a great deal of user participation and resulted in a clear vision of what the community wanted. A close relationship was forged between users and client. The design that ensued succeeds in balancing the need for security and discipline with an environment which feels relaxed and open incorporating a rich mixture of education and community spaces which are equally inclusive. One of the key priorities which emerged early on was the need for clear organisation of the different parts of the scheme, to break down the scale of the development.

Centred around a triple-height ‘internal street’ which gives easy access to all areas, secondary circulation corridors bisect the street service into four wings of accommodation which are almost self-contained, like schools within schools. The four wings contain DT, vocational and food technology, science and art, PBSC (positive behaviour support), staff, geography and history, English, ICT and business studies. There is a grand entrance lobby leading onto the internal street. On either side of the entrance there are more community orientated areas such as music, drama and sports together with the main assembly hall and dining. These spaces can be open when the rest of the school is closed. The classrooms are of particular educational interest in that they have been specially designed to meet the requirements of Dagenham’s innovative pedagogical model. It involves interactive whole-class teaching for which a single ‘horseshoe’ arrangement of desks is required, allowing all students to see the teacher and each other during lessons. This has resulted in larger than average classrooms which also offer flexible arrangements for group work. Long term flexibility is provided not by way of moveable wall panels but by clear planning hierarchies (allowing future expansion), generous space standards and most importantly, robust construction to resist the attention of present and future generations of young people.

This is an approach which has delivered on a vision of extended use. Why should school sites close their doors to the users at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon? Here the school is open until 10 pm every night of the school week and until 8 pm at weekends. The huge investment at Jo Richardson not only provides an efficient learning environment for school students, it extends the use of those valuable facilities towards the wider community, providing a new learning campus of which all members of the community who use it can be proud.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.