How Long is a Piece of String?

Leading Through a School Rebuilding Project

A Pathe news story in the 1950s proudly trumpeted the building of a new primary school in Paddington - built in 18 months and costing £120,000. Seventy years on and Hallfield Primary School is still using the same buildings.

Fifty years later the first spade went in the ground on a site in Peterborough that was to become the largest secondary school in England. Whilst the build process took two years, the design and planning stages had taken nearly two years before that… and some of the school fields (reclaimed from the demolition site of a previous building) would take another 18 months to be in use – a five year programme from beginning to end and costing nearly £50m.

Directly involved in that project as a Headteacher of one of the 3 predecessor schools merging together (yes...seriously!), the complexity of that project resulted in a year's delay at the beginning to the projected 2004 start for a 2006 finish. It was the right decision and the finished project in 2007 rightly received national plaudits. However, delays like this offer multiple challenges - not the least being the extending the maintenance of ageing structures and equipment far beyond their serviceable life. 

So How Long will my project take?

Leading a school through a building project is not on any school leadership qualification curriculum as far as I know. If your school is one of the 518 projects in the DfE School Rebuilding Programme then you need to know that the first stage of the process (up to the end of what Is known as RIBA4) is probably going to take up to 18 months. That’s after your project gets the go-ahead.

Neither the construction sector nor the public purse could have coped if all 518 had been green-lit at the same time. After a steady and a spectacular start it is reassuring to know that DfE funding will ramp up from 2026 onwards to the end of the parliament.

If there are complexities associated with design or planning – then your design and planning process could be longer.

Input into the design of your new school will be come from a range of consultants:

The initial design parameters will be impacted by the pedagogical and organisational structures within the current school. School leaders will have a major input on this. The standardisation of space allocation will often mean that while teaching space stays the same, there is less flexible storage/office space. The SoA (Statement of Accommodation) is the summary of how that space will be allocated. Thankfully, the expertise developed within Architectural practices and main building contractors means that the area you do have available will be maximised and it is impressive to see these professionals at work as they manage the ‘adjacencies’ of spaces.

There is an increasingly well-defined DfE process for these SRP projects but if you are a school leader you can expect there to be regular meetings (CEMs: Client Engagement Meetings) – often online – at which you will be asked your opinion about anything from toilet cubicles to brick types. We would encourage you to offer to host some of these meetings on your current site. They give you a chance to meet the individuals working on your school and a proper chance for them to get the context of the project they are working on. Don’t hesitate to ask for explanations of terms and acronyms relating to the build process – although the main contractor design managers and building project managers are used to working on schools, not all the contributing companies will be. Don’t make assumptions about what you will get, they need to know what is different and special about your school to design a school that best fits your pupils’ specific requirements. As a school leader the key contribution you can make is advocating for your children, staff and community and it’s important to remember that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for that community.

There will always be a public consultation during the design stages and school leaders play a crucial role in this. The school will probably host this and it is crucial for the project that you utilise your real-life and online connections with the local community to prepare the ground – planning objections very often slow projects and suck momentum. A long hiatus caused by the planning process makes it difficult to get design teams back engaged as their focus may have switched to other projects.

Whilst modular, off-site construction lessens time on-site, it puts even greater stress on getting the design process right… and sometimes the pieces don’t quite fit! Once as founding Principal of a new school I visited during construction to witness a rather large mis-placed aperture in a timber frame being filled as quickly as possible!

A normal primary school will typically take between 12 and 15 months to complete from the ground-breaking to PC (practical completion) when your new school will be handed over to you. Secondary schools often require 18 months on-site to complete the buildings – or more if there are different phases and temporary accommodation to contend with. Phased projects require careful coordination if schooling is carrying on around them and it is best to dedicate a member of SLT to cover that coordination role.

When – at last – you are nearing completion, those last few weeks on-site can be a frantic time and if it falls across the summer break you’ll need a team available to liaise with the contractor team: school leader/site manager and network manager will need to be available for all or part of that time.

I’d advise you to secure your own PPE – borrowing from the main contractor is possible (think PE spare kit issues) but comfortable boots/safety shoes are a must if you’re going to be making lots of visits to site. I once got the task of taking a group of staff round a partially-completed site and ended up with two left-foot boots once everyone had raided the contractors’ pile of footwear!

Novatia’s role in the process

For many teams on the project there will be a significant break at the end of RIBA4. The design stages are complete and it moves into the construction phase. The delivery phase specialists take over. As ICT consultants we often find on projects that our consultants join the projects very early and are there at the end, going all through the pre-construction and construction phases to both design and then to supply, install, configure and train users on the technology. We work for the main contractor to minimise risk and maximise efficiency – but understand and appreciate the challenges of those leading schools through such major projects.