Manchester’s first completed BSF project, Gorton Education Village, opened in September, bringing two schools – a comprehensive and a specialist SEN college – together on one eight-acre campus.

The reality of bringing mainstream and SEN pupils together in one building required deep consultation at every stage of the process. For Gorton, “involving stakeholders” was not just a worthy concept, but an absolute necessity.

You notice a lot of things when you enter Gorton Education Village – the light and space created by the wide, two-storey, glazed  “street” running the full 100 metre length of the building, the smartness of the kids in their new uniforms, and a buzz of purposeful activity that signals a well-run school that has got on top of the discipline business.

In this case, it’s two schools living side-by-side in one building, so large and complex that its campus director Tracey Bishop has a nickname for it – “the Beast”.

Cedar Mount is a 900-pupil comprehensive serving one of the most deprived and ethnically diverse areas of East Manchester, while Melland is specialist support school which gained national specialist  SEN college status mid-way through the BSF project, with 150 pupils from central and East Manchester and beyond.

Each includes children with SEN, some of whom have profound and multiple learning difficulties. The pupils from each school mix and mingle in the “street” on their way to lessons, dine together, share lessons and assemblies and even sit on a joint student council.

Vision for inclusion

Six weeks into its first full term, this vision of an inclusive campus is working better than anyone dared hope. “The bonding has been incredible,” says Melland head teacher Judith O’Kane, OBE. “I think there’s a sort of empathy coming through, the Cedar Mount children are seeing severe disability and beginning to accept it. They’re not being phased by it.”

Cedar Mount and Melland were near neighbours, and had a history of co-operation. Their head teachers – Guy Hutchence at Cedar Mount and Judith O’Kane at Melland – shared a passion for inclusion, and both schools were known for pushing way beyond official guidelines as to what this word actually means.

This is where their vision to bring the two schools together started. Judith O’Kane explains: “Way before BSF was introduced, I worked with Guy on this idea of sharing a campus.

“We brought in Mel Ainscow (professor of education at Manchester University and an expert on inclusion and equity in education) and together we developed a vision just for this. It was very considered, and very dynamic and proactive in its approach .”

Head teachers Guy Hutchence and Judith O'Kane at the opening of Gorton Education Village.

They were considering “going down the PFI route”, when Manchester City Council joined the first phase of the BSF programme:  “We were immediately on board.”

This initial vision also included a local primary school, Gordon Mount. The idea was to have three schools on one campus. Funding hasn’t allowed this yet, but according to Judith O’Kane, this should still happen: “We already have a site earmarked.”

Planning and consultation

The architects and construction firm for the project – Ellis Williams Architects  and  Laing O’Rourke –  proved to be “highly professional and very forward thinking,” Judith O’Kane says. “Before pen was put to paper, we talked educational concepts, inspiration , teaching and learning. So when we actually started designing the building, we brought in total flexibility.”

If necessary, she says, it would be easy to re-purpose areas by moving walls – and there were  plenty of  shared, open spaces between the two schools “that can be multi-purpose used.”

The design emerged from an extended period of consultation with the stakeholders of both schools during 2006, with construction starting on the brownfields site towards the end of that year.

One of the most visible results of this consultation is the arrangement of “learning spaces” within the building. Both schools have rejected the old corridor and classroom pattern. Melland’s pupils learn and socialise in five different learning zones, while Cedar Mount’s new curriculum takes physical shape in a series of faculty areas, each more or less self-contained, with large open plan teaching areas suitable for team teaching, as well as smaller, more enclosed rooms for traditional classroom style work.  Light, visibility, open planning, shared spaces, and flexibility are the keywords across both schools.

The design itself  encourages regular mixing of the pupils from both schools – which in turn, says Melland’s deputy head Sue Warner,  prompts  “a sort of incidental inclusion”.

In some cases, extra space has been won by taking the BB98 school building guidelines (and its equivalent for SEN schools) and being a bit creative.

Cedar Mount’s art area is a case in point, as Tracey Bishop explains: “Under BB98, for a school of 900, there should only be two artrooms”, she says.

“But effectively we have four. Officially this is a graphics technology room – but it’s really an art room.  And we’ve used the square meterage to give more space between rooms.”


"This is your space: how do you want it to work?"

Richard Bishop, head of business studies, explains how his dedicated area took shape during consultation meetings in July 2006: “As heads of department we were given a blank canvas, it was, ‘this is your space, how do you want it work?’”

“We were given a lot of freedom, like, where do the doors go – I was able to say, I need about 28 computers round the edge, a meeting area in the middle, a separate lecture area. The result is a very vocational area.”

“It was a case of,  if you don’t ask you don’t get,” Richard says.  He valued the flexible approach of the BSF team: “They understood that you have to have buy-in,” he explains. “If this doesn’t work it’s my fault, I have to make it work because it was my idea!”

Pupils were also consulted, and the end result is a hit with both staff and pupils. “There’s been  colossal impact on behaviour,  which has a knock on effect to quality of teaching – it’s a virtuous circle,” Richard adds.

There are massive areas of glass on both the external and internal walls around the school, so there’s high visibility everywhere.  One result of this, Richard Bishop adds, is that “It forces you to raise your game as a teacher because you’re on display. If you’re sitting back surfing the net or whatever you’ll be found out!”

“I’ve never been happier as a teacher – it’s good to see the kids so happy too. Every pupil was made aware of what the vision was – every pupil had at least one visit to site before we opened. But there was still the wow factor on first day.”

Moving in

Getting to that first day of shared usage was an epic of planning and consultation. Tracey Bishop, then assistant head at Cedar Mount, was given full responsibility for managing each stage of their project from initial consultations, through visits to the school as it took shape, to the final moving-in.

“Those final two months were probably the hardest we’d worked all our lives,” says Tracey, as we grab a coffee in The Bistro, a  café area used by staff and pupils through the day.  “We were on our knees at the end of it, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was eight weeks of organised chaos. We had GCSEs going on at the same time!”

The head took a step back, leaving the day-to-day management of the move to Tracey and cover manager /careers co-ordinator  Geraldine Hulston. “We project managed the move ,” Geraldine said. “We wrote a 'decant strategy' which covered every last detail, day by day.”

“One of the main things was to ensure staff didn’t bring too much stuff with them – it was a real bit of life laundry for us all.”

ICT

Gorton has taken full advantage of the BSF ICT funding.  ICT permeates the campus.  Up in Cedar Mount’s Learning Resource Centre, Eamonn Jundi, e-Learning director, is fine-tuning the Ramesys “Assimilate” VLE which is about to be rolled out to all staff and pupils.

As an initial exercise, he set up a pupil survey – asking questions such as, “How do you like being taught in an open plan area?” Early responses give an 86 per cent thumbs up.

“Even old me likes it – and I had reservations,” Eamonn says. “It was so easy to set this survey up – once staff get used to it, we’ll set up voting for heads of house and so on. Every pupil will use these surveys.”

Tracey says that staff are already thrilled to have email that actually works: “We’re communicating much more now – we’re working smarter,” she says. There are over 100 computers for private study, and dedicated workstations for staff. eyond that, there’s media on tap, with IWBs in every teaching area. You want music in a lesson? Plug your iPod into a dock, and it’s there. And that’s not to mention the astonishingly well-equipped theatre, or Melland’s interactive multi-media studio, or its interactive sensory room.

Quality of life

Staff in both schools used two phrases more than any other when describing what their new building meant to them and their pupils: “a better quality of life” and “a sense of wellbeing”.

There’s collective feeling here that at long last these children have the building and resources they deserve. There’s plenty of talk of how academic results are already improving as a result – but that is not the chief criterion of success for either school.

Furniture

The “sense of wellbeing” ethos extends into every detail, even the furniture.  “Furniture was tailor made for the Gorton campus” Tracey Bishop says. “ We were the test-bed. We had about 100 different chairs, 20 different tables, stools, etc to try out. For example, with the desks – we can change the tops, they’re affordable.

“We looked at so many different stools! We went for a design classic. Every single piece of furniture was tested. This gas lift chair – we had 20 to chose from. There are no castors to scratch the floor  – it just glides. “This furniture will go into all new schools in Manchester,” she says.

Uniform

 Cedar Mount also introduced a new uniform to coincide with the move: a traditional blazers and ties outfit that it was felt could help instil a sense of pride.  The kids had taken well to it – “I’ve noticed that even the diehard Primark girls  have taken to the uniform – the ties are a nightmare but aren’t they always?”

Bell

One thing you notice for its absence: there is no constant ringing of school bells.

This small reform was not part of the planning and consultation  process, but a spontaneous decision taken after a couple of days of being driven nearly mad by the bells of two different schools going off at slightly different times.

On-costs

Tracey admits there’s been  an “on-cost” in the brightness and spaciousness of the building. With all that glass, the window cleaning bill is approaching £1,000 a month – breathtaking, even though this had been factored in to the running costs.  And soaring electricity bills caused the school to install to motion-sensitive switching. As we toured the school, this system was proving all too effective – with teachers flailing their arms towards the ceiling in the hope of persuading the lights to come back on.

Tracey is philosophical. “I suppose you can’t expect to get everything right first time,” she says.

Points for reflection

• Stick to your guns in the planning stages
• Bring in experts from outside: eg, Mel Ainscow in the case of the inclusion agenda, Stage North to help resource the performance areas, etc.
• Attention to detail is vital through planning stages, and in the transition from old to new buildings: for example, it was important that the Melland pupils moved in first, to give them time to acclimatise.
• Consultations with staff and pupils is vital – but however much you build in to the process, there will still be staff who will say they were not fully heard.
• However well you plan, there’ll always be some fine-tuning to do in the first weeks after the move.