Housing x Education: Joined Up Delivery

A sea change in school delivery is happening…so we put on a breakfast seminar to tell you all about it.

Last week, in the cosy setting of The Ivy Soho Brasserie, Architecture Inititiative co-hosted the 'Housing x Education – Joined-up Delivery' Breakfast Seminar with Iceni Projects.

Schools are one of the most important pieces of infrastructure that is delivered on a site, yet this area of development is often overlooked. In the past it wouldn’t have been uncommon to draw a line around a piece of land in the corner of a housing allocation, label it a school and to not think anything more about it until a contractor came forward with an application. However, the way in which schools are being delivered is changing significantly both financially and physically

At our Breakfast Seminar we heard about how increasingly we’ll be seeing the co-location of schools and other uses, such as housing and retail on the same site. For many years, we’ve been told that incorporating schools vertically or horizontally on a mixed use scheme is fraught with difficulty and not to bother, but we were able to demonstrate how we have successfully achieved this on a number of schemes. This delivers a range of potential benefits including making more efficient use of land and optimising the number of much needed homes on a site.

Bruce Glockling, Head of Regeneration at Southwark, talked about the specific design guidelines they are setting out to help deliver this form of development in a more urban environment. Whereas, Mike van den Berg from Urban & Civic explained how and why they look to deliver schools as early as they can, as the focal point of more strategic greenfield developments. This drive higher values and faster sales rates from their schemes and delivers the highest quality level of placemaking.

Aside from looking at the drivers of these trends, Iceni explored some of the financial changes to delivery, including the greater emphasis on developers from planning obligations and the opportunities for site finding as well as due diligence arising from a new national standardised pupil yield calculation.

The picture that was painted was one of a whole host of changes across different areas interacting with each other and some major changes coming on the horizon for school delivery.

Unfortunately we were a victim of our success on this and the event booked up very quickly, as a result we have created a brochure summarising the key points made by the speakers.

#events #thoughtleadership #education #partnership #residential