And the school has quite a turnaround to celebrate. The old Colfox School was a ramshackle affair with temporary classrooms that had to be evacuated when winds reached 55 mph and a sixth form that was split between two sites. Now, the renamed 900-pupil school has shiny new premises and £1.75m of brand new equipment, including suites of PCs, and even two airport-style monitors that tell pupils and staff what’s happening and when. It is also the first school in the country to have a full-time, on-site operations manager.
But the school’s obvious delight with its new surroundings – total upfront cost £12m; 30-year cost to Dorset County Council £90m – makes the indifferent architecture all the more noticeable. The upfront costs for the 10 000 m2 school were above average: construction and landscaping came to £1025/m2, including fees, compared with Davis Langdon & Everest’s national average construction cost of £700-750/m2,. This has resulted in a robust, low-maintenance building that no doubt meets Colfox’s needs, but hardly exceeds them. If Bridport is typical of PFI schools, the next generation of children has a lot of uninspiring architecture to look forward to.
The design by architect Terence O’Rourke is workmanlike, built around a central street with a circular dining hall and sixth-form area at either end, and the gym, assembly hall and three teaching blocks leading off it. Daylighting is good, with windows set into the double-pitched roof lighting the second-floor labs, classrooms and the central street. But the bland internal colour scheme – cream and pale blue – seems to have been chosen to be inoffensive to the conference clientele that will also use the building, rather than stimulating for the school community.
There’s a myth that with PFI, you get what you’re given. We asked for and got what we wanted
Headteacher Chris Mason
The exterior elevations have little articulation and come over as a jumble of colours and surfaces. Greyish cedar panels breaking up the brickwork were evidently a planning requirement and, indeed, look like a tacked-on afterthought. And two months after the building opened, the self-coloured white render was showing unappealing grey splodges, described by Jarvis as the natural result of salts and minerals in the material leaking through to the surface.
PFI schools run on the principle that the school provides the pupils, staff and textbooks, and the PFI company delivers everything else: the building, its furniture and equipment, including computers, catering and cleaning, and maintenance and repairs. After Jarvis Construction packed up in August, after 20 months on site, it started the handover to Jarvis Facilities Management, which will be responsible for fulfilling Dorset Council’s performance specifications for the next 30 years. Shortfalls will mean reductions in the council’s monthly bill.
Maintaining standards is down to on-site manager Ian Hadfield, who, with a staff of three, deals with the day-to-day running and operates a helpdesk for staff complaints or requests. These can range from a classroom being too hot or cold to a child throwing up. “We’ve established a good working relationship between ourselves and the staff and it’s important not to lose it,” he says.
The surroundings give you more encouragement
Ceri Lloyd-Hughes
He adds, though, that there has been a need for “some expectation management”. This has been the case with the PCs; not all are working, but Jarvis’ performance framework simply states that a certain number must be working and, so far, they are.
The building is devoted to school activities between 8am and 6pm during the week but designed to attract income outside these hours from other sources, such as sports clubs, social events and conferences. The PFI contract was set up to treat the school as an income-generating resource, with profits beyond budgeted income being shared between the council, the school and Jarvis. Bridport is a rural area with few competing facilities, so the expectation of steady earnings appears reasonable.
The prospect of extra income to pay for additional members of staff is just one of the advantages of the PFI route that headteacher Mason is extolling at conferences. More important still is the prospect of higher academic performance, following the dramatic improvement in the pupils’ surroundings. “It makes the children feel cared-for and adult,” he says. ”We already had a 4% improvement last year in A-C grades at GCSE that we put down partly to the anticipation of moving to the new building.” There has also been a higher-than-average stay-on rate for pupils entering the sixth form.
Everything’s new. All the old equipment used to blow up
Music Student Chris Briden on the New Studio
According to Mason, contracting a company with no experience in education to select and buy all the school’s equipment has not resulted in any compromise over quality. “There’s a myth that with PFI you get what you’re given,” he says. “We asked for and got what we wanted.” Meanwhile, Jarvis describes this aspect of the project as the most taxing so far. “We had to obtain samples of everything, from desks and lockers to sewing machines and test tubes,” recalls development director Ken Gill.
Yet it is hard to imagine that everyone got exactly what they wanted. For instance, instead of comfy chairs or sofas, the staff and sixth-form common rooms have tube-framed seating with blue seat pads of the kind found in hospital waiting rooms. Apart from consulting department heads on technical equipment, and some input from the art and design staff, teachers and pupils do not appear to have been involved in any of the decision-making.
That is not to say that they are complaining. Special-needs English teacher Lucy Hardwick says she feels “spoilt” by all the facilities, and particularly enjoys the miniature amphitheatre built in the landscaped grounds that can be used for plays or storytelling. Year-nine pupil Ceri Lloyd-Hughes believes the surroundings “give you more encouragement” and appreciates the fact that they are not “tacky”. A-level music student Chris Briden is delighted with the studio facilities: “Everything’s new. All the old equipment used to blow up.” But he wonders whether a 30-year mortgage is the best use of Dorset County Council’s £90m.
