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Hackwood Primary Academy

Derby

Project Details

£5m to £9.99M

New Build

Practice

Lungfish Architects Ltd

Level 2 , City Gate West , Tollhouse Hill , NOTTINGHAM , NG1 5AT

The creation of a large, new housing development comprising of 700 homes, Derby City Council approached Lungfish and Morgan Sindall Construction to help deliver a brand-new primary school to support the growing community. With the new estate growing rapidly, the school needed to be open and fully operational by September 2019. This meant Derby City Council required a fast approach to construction. In order to meet the timescales to design and build the new school, we knew that the offsite, modular approach was the best way to meet the client’s needs. The major benefit of modular design is that cost and programme assurance can be guaranteed from a very early stage. With the offsite approach, almost 90% of the build is constructed away from site, which helped to minimise the impact on the local community already experiencing a high level of construction traffic. The 14,000sq ft school is created out of 42 carefully manufactured modules. The modules arrived onsite at the end of February and went from foundation level to all modules being in place in just seven days, allowing the build to progress quickly and efficiently. The school was handed over in August 2019 with the first cohort of pupils starting in September. The single storey one form-entry primary school features a large hall, six spacious classrooms and a 26-place nursery. Internally, the large classrooms feature a modern and bright design throughout, creating positive and engaging learning environments. The building will provide an effective healthy indoor environment with natural day-lighting and ventilation along with thermal comfort and acoustics which have been designed to support educational attainment. The colour theme is continued externally, with cladding to reflect the school logo. The school is also future proofed with an innovative, expandable layout that will allow additional teaching space to be added in the future, which could increase the total capacity up to 315.