How we did it ... School brings benefits for pupils young and old

Mark Smulian, Planning, 20 June 2008

Background: The Church of England wanted to rebuild a failing school that was housed in substandard buildings. It needed another project on the site to finance this and chose student accommodation.

Who is behind it? Unite, a specialist provider of student accommodation, the London Diocesan Board for Schools and the London Borough of Camden.

Project Aims: To provide a new 2,000m2 school for 240 pupils aged three to 11 and 168 units of student accommodation. The latter is leased from the board by Unite for 125 years.

Skills involved: Project management of demolition and rebuild, partnership working and familiarity with the planning process for student residences.

Somerset Court won the best community-based planning initiative category in the London Planning Awards 2007 run by London First and the RTPI.

Its unusual combination of primary school and university student accommodation was devised to answer a problem that faced the London Diocesan Board for Schools after its St Mary and St Pancras School was heavily criticised by Ofsted in 2003 for poor academic performance and unsatisfactory accommodation.

The Church of England wanted to keep a school on the site but needed to find a way to pay for demolition of the old Victorian school and its prefabricated additions and its replacement with modern buildings.

One perhaps obvious solution would have been to place social housing on the site. But this proved problematic, since under tenancy rules it would be difficult to remove residents should any cause difficulties in proximity to young children.

The board then considered student accommodation and after trying unsuccessfully to set deals direct with various universities turned to Unite, a specialist developer and manager of student residencies.

Managing director Matthew McAdden explains: "Social housing would not have been an easy mix with young children. Our tenants are all on six-month or one-year assured shorthold tenancies and so can be evicted if they break rules or cause nuisance. There have been very few problems though."

McAdden says his company has secured planning permission on 28 projects in the past eight years, six of them in Camden, and so it was well-known to council planners as well as enjoying support from universities.

"It took a great effort to assemble a partnership and team working to deliver this mixed-use regeneration. We had to go through all the usual hoops and there was a lot of legal work involved and a huge number of boxes of paper," he recalls.

One major feat of organisation was to keep all the pupils in school while building work took place. The pupils moved into portable classrooms on the site in 2004 before the old school was demolished while they were away during the 2005 Easter break. The student accommodation was occupied by January 2007 and the whole development handed over to the church two months later, McAdden says.

There is also a facility on the site for Sure Start, a government programme that brings together early years education, childcare health and family support, which had formerly been located nearby but not integral to the school.

The school is traditionally built on two storeys with a concrete frame, extensive glazing and brightly coloured infill panels. Exploiting the development value of the air rights above this are four storeys of modular student bedrooms provided from Unite's off-site manufacturing facility. Prefabrication reduced both costs and the impact of construction work on the school.

There is also a regeneration benefit from the students' presence in an inner city area, Unite says. It points to its 2007 student experience survey, which showed that student spending power is a catalyst for economic regeneration and one-third said they intend to remain in the town or city where they studied after they graduate.

In recognising the project's outstanding achievement, the award judges said they were impressed that Somerset Court showed "how the two different and potentially conflicting uses have been integrated into one building".