Lewisham Schools PFI

Year | 2002

Location | Lewisham, London, UK

Clients | Gordonbrock Primary School and Crofton Secondary School

The Private Finance Initiative or PFI is a means of procuring public buildings is strongly advocated by the current government. The major concern with PFI is that design quality is sacrificed in the interests of cutting costs for the private consortium.

Gordonbrock Primary School and Crofton Secondary School in Lewisham SE London are two such schools that are scheduled for demolition with the replacement schools being financed by PFI. The aims of this project is to highlight current problems and to establish a set of design criteria that should be applied to the new schools as a means of ensuring that design quality is not sacrificed.

The first stage was to examine and evaluate the current design guidelines produced by the Department for Education involving study into the teaching day and the National Curriculum.

From this initial research it became evident school spaces require an increasing degree of flexibility to respond to a demanding and ever evolving National Curriculum plus the need for the school to cater for the wider community beyond the constrains of the normal school opening hours. We believe that essential qualities of building design such as site specific architecture and the lack of guidelines for the quality of space should be addressed within our project.

Credits

Mentor:

Mark Dudek