Hackney New School is a new mixed-ability Free School with a focus on music, combining a 500-pupil secondary school and 200-pupil sixth form, for clients Hackney New School, Education & Skills Funding Authority & Willmott Dixon Pupils are taught in groups of 25 and spend much of their time in their class base, with teachers coming to them. Music, drama, art, design and technology, science and SEN provision occurs outside their base. The site, which is next to the Kingsland Canal basin and in a conservation area, is tight. The 5,500m2 scheme is planned around a central ball court and play space. This is framed by the 6-storey Canal building and the 5-storey Kingsland building which forms a buffer from the noise and fumes of Kingsland Road. The Canal building accommodates a double-height multipurpose dining, music and drama performance space, a floor for music, another for science, the staff room, library, 6th form study and social spaces, and 60% of the secondary school class bases. The Kingsland building accommodates staff and admin, and Art, Design and Technology. The adaptive reuse of a disused telephone exchange accommodates the rest of the classrooms and sixth form seminar spaces, SEN, the changing rooms and storage ‘warehouse’. In due course, the original Wharfmaster’s house is to be converted to create a pupil wellbeing centre. This collection of brick buildings frame a series of precincts between the streets and the canal basin. The Canal building and disused telephone exchange are linked by bridges at each level to ease circulation and provide an alternative means of escape between these two single-staircase buildings. The practice worked in conjunction with structural engineer Pure Structures, M&E engineer Skelly & Couch, planning consultant CMA Planning and PM Mace. Hackney New School has been published in The Observer and Architecture Today. The building was shortlisted for an RIBA Award. We are now working on the 350 pupil Hackney New Primary School for our clients Thornsett, The Benyon Estate, Hackney New Primary School and the Education & Skills Funding Authority. The scheme is cross-subsidised on site by a development of 68 apartments. It will be completed in 2019.