Novatia enables outdoor and kinaesthetic learning at Hill View School.

Hill View School is a new 5-16 co-educational special free school, established within The Oak Partnership Trust, to cater to the unique needs of children with speech, language, communication and social emotional and mental health difficulties. 

Situated in South Somerset, the school provides a personalised learning experience that aligns with the national curriculum while putting specialised support and innovative teaching methods front and centre to educational delivery.

Mark Penny, Construction Manager on the project oversaw the delivery stage of the school building programme:

“At the outset of the project, Hill View School was a total Greenfield site, situated on a Farmer’s Field. Because of how close the site is to the A303 (Fosse Way) - a road dating back to Roman times - the first 10-12 weeks of the build stage the site hosted an archaeological dig, where remains were found of a Romano-British body dating back to the Iron Age.”

Following safe excavation, once the construction started, the school was carefully constructed using local Ham Hill stone, the same as is used at St Paul’s cathedral. It was crucial to build a school which was not only modern but also reflective of the local area. This meant no thick concrete walls: just brick, cladding or stone was used across the whole project. 

Sustainability was front and centre in the design of the school. Half of the roof hosts Photovoltaic (PV) panels that convert the sun’s thermal energy into electricity, with the other half a living, ‘green’ roof. 

Air source heat pumps, which transfer heat from the outside air to water, are used to heat Hill View which means everything is fully electric with no gas or oil.

Getting IT right

With the building design offering a modern, sustainable and progressive vision of school life, it was only befitting that the technology was up to the same supreme standards. 

Mark expands: “When we took on Hill View, the IT requirement wasn’t initially included in the scope of work. But that picture changed soon after, and it was at that point we engaged with Novatia. 

“We were happy to engage Novatia at the earliest opportunity. In my experience, getting Novatia as the education technology specialists is a case of the earlier the better in order to de-risk the project and get DfE sign off first-time.”

Working together, Novatia and CMB (the project's electrical contractor) enabled effective integration of digital technologies into the physical design of the teaching and learning spaces. This enabled the interactive boards in the classrooms and portable devices in the outdoor learning spaces to connect to the wireless networks across the entire site, providing greater flexibility for learners and teachers to work with digital content to support their learning. 

Novatia has sourced, configured, installed and integrated the active network including Network Switches and Wi-Fi with a full suite of cloud management capabilities. The school has a purpose built server room and sports hall networking hub, that both meets the current IT demand and allows for growth in use of IT over time.

In terms of classroom technology, in the initial stages of the delivery phase, a model classroom was developed to allow all stakeholders to see how the vision behind the school was coming to life through the new building. This meant that the senior leadership team and teachers could get hands-on with the classroom technology and validate that it served the teaching and learning needs.

“Between us, it was about working out the best way to meet the educational requirements to support the learning element,” adds Mark. 

Outdoor Learning

Pedagogically, Hill View School recognises the importance of incorporating outdoor learning into the curriculum and the school was designed to incorporate this philosophy. 

Each classroom has its own external area to support play based development, where  learners can explore, create and solve problems. In addition to each classroom's external areas, there is a wider outdoor provision incorporating Forest School provision that offers superb learning opportunities in an engaging environment, as well as enabling the horticulture vocational education program to provide hands-on experience and skill development for green-fingered learners wishing to pursue this career pathway.

Robust and secure Wi-Fi is available in all learning spaces, whether indoor or outdoors.

Kinaesthetic Learning

A cornerstone of Hill View School's pedagogy focuses on movement and activity as an enabler to learner engagement. 

Learners participate in physical activities, creative movement exercises, and drama-based learning, to help cognition and comprehension. These kinaesthetic approaches ensure that every learner can actively engage with the curriculum and maximise their learning potential.

There’s a Multi-Use-Games-Area and expansive playing field in addition to the Forest School provision. 

Within the classroom setting, each classroom has fully integrated Interactive displays within the teachings wall that allow for movement-based learning and collaboration. 

A range of audio and visual equipment has been installed in the hall as part of the drama and creative arts provision at Hill View School: 

• Projector
• Music desk
• Lectern with amplifier
• Retractable screen
• Lighting Bar and Systems
  
  

Why Novatia?

When asked about whether Mark would recommend Novatia as an education specialist, Mark is clear in his response: 

“Novatia has been patient, collaborative, and helped us to build a fantastic school, while avoiding any potential pitfall for the project.

“They helped us to build a strong relationship with Hill View School based on trust and shared learning, handing over the building a week early, which you can imagine went down brilliantly with the school, DfE and our project team. 

“ICT can be seen as a dark art and a big risk for main contractors, and Novatia has been able to de-risk it with diligence and perseverance. Building projects are complex, and always going to be challenges to overcome. They’ve been pragmatic, coming on site dozens of times to come and oversee issue resolution.

“It really helps that Novatia has documented standard processes and really strong education consultants who have all come from education themselves. 

“This was all evidenced in how well Novatia engaged with the DfE ICT specialist, who came down and signed it all off ahead of our intended schedule. Fantastic stuff.”