The school itself opened in 1967 to 460 pupils, saw a steady decline to around 210 in 1982 and has grown again to around 440 pupils today. It’s now under the inspirational headship of Peter Dean, affectionally know as Pirate Pete by the CAP.CO team.
The site has a central playing field with woodland that surrounds it and some unused space near the school itself. Our first job in phase one was to create an early years classroom outdoors that creates a multi-use space of around 10mx10m. It links seamlessly into the school building and takes the children over a covered bridge to reach their destination. At the same time, working with Pete and his team, we created the new adventure play in the woodland area.
You can see the overview of the site here:
The vision was to get children outside, playing and learning together in the natural environment. This outdoor play also had a covered area that allows informal teaching and even includes a blackboard. This is used for role play, performances along with dry(ish) play when it rains.
You can see the scope of what we explored with the initial sketches
From the initial sketches and getting a better understanding of the site, we worked up some of our usual CGI’s so the team could start to imagine the size and scale of the proposed build.
