Building Quality from design to handover
Nick Coke, WT Partnership, Niamh Evans, CIOB & Jo Marchant, The Boxing Academy

Construction clients play a pivotal role in society’s efforts to raise industry standards, improve collaborative working, encourage innovation and push towards net-zero. In March 2023 the CIOB launched its first online resources for clients under a new Client Strategy which engages with clients to understand their needs and to promote best practice resources
and decision making. Linda Stevens, Head of Client Development at CIOB, will outline how the CIOB Client Strategy is supporting clients.

From the purist perspective it is easy to define quality – you ascertain what you want, you assign criteria that mark that quality being achieved – acceptance criteria – and you then monitor when that state is achieved. Nick Coke, Director at WT Partnership will talk about how that translates to good quality and what denotes best practice in the current market? Nick will highlight best practice examples throughout the industry and compare some of the quality systems in use.

Jo Marchant, Estates Professional at the Boxing Academy, has been involved in a number of new build projects – additional modular classrooms, reception design, a new 6th form and sports hall build and a new build for an alternative provision. In 2019-2020 she worked at a local authority-maintained school whose new building had been handed over in September 2017. She spent 18 months negotiating with the main contractor and local authority to rectify the significant building defects post snagging with remedial costs of over £100,000. In this session Jo will share the lessons learned from her experience and draw on material from her book The School Premises Handbook.

Long life – Loose Fit
Simon Innes, Innes Associates

Contrasting the current tightly controlled specification of school spaces with the “long life, loose fit” maxim, this talk sets out a reasoned case, with examples, for why we should reconsider how we write our briefs for the design of school projects, and what benefits for education, cost and energy-consumption a new approach could have.

Change is a constant in UK pedagogy. Designers have responded with new ideas each time in the last 150 years a new approach to teaching has come along. During Building Schools for Future, it was about transformative approaches to teaching and learning. We saw radical new spaces from designers for both; more recently we have a return to basics, and with building design to match.

As the Department for Education’s [DfE] first Net Zero In Operation schools are completed, ideas about sustainability are also are changing. This talk will illustrate with, three recent examples, the outcomes of the latest building brief from the DfE and compare their performance with future trends in pedagogy and approaches to sustainability. It examines in which ways the buildings may struggle to adapt to new conditions.

With reflections on other challenges related to funding and sustainability, new ideas will be put forward for how the next generation of schools can become more adaptable.