Gorton Education Village: creating a single-site campus for inclusive education

Case study

Gorton Education Village, opened in September 2008, bringing two schools - a comprehensive and a specialist special educational needs (SEN) college - together on one eight-acre campus.

Background

Cedar Mount High School is a 900-pupil comprehensive serving a deprived and ethnically diverse areas of East Manchester. Melland SEN High School is a specialist support school, with 150 pupils from across the whole of Manchester. The Gorton Education Village project brought the two schools together in a new building, featuring a two-storey 100m internal 'street', a sports hall and community wing, a learning resource centre containing library and ICT facilities and specialist subject zones. There is also a medical suite on-site offering physiotherapy and a hydrotherapy pool.

Vision

Cedar Mount and Melland were near neighbours, and had a history of co-operation. Both headteachers - Guy Hutchence at Cedar Mount and Judith O’Kane at Melland - had a passion for inclusion and this is where their vision to bring the two schools together started. Working with Professor Mel Ainscow from Manchester University, an expert on inclusion and equity in education, the two headteachers began the process of creating a single campus. Originally the plan was to go down the private finance initiative (PFI) route, but when Manchester City Council joined the first phase of the Building Schools for the Future 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 didn't allow this, but it could happen in the future.

Stakeholders

The reality of bringing mainstream and SEN pupils together in one building required consultation at every stage of the process. For Gorton, involving stakeholders was an absolute necessity.

Through consultation meetings, staff were able to influence the design. Richard Bishop, head of business studies, explains how his dedicated area took shape: “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.”

Pupils were also consulted, and the end result has been well received by 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.”

Consultation

The architects and construction firm for the project 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.”

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”.

Impact

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 Judith Melland. “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.”

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.

Lessons learnt

Stick to your guns in the planning stages.
Bring in experts from outside.
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.