It continues to be a busy time for our Education team. Our latest project has just been submitted for planning and involves a 2 classroom extension, new synthetic surface Multi Use Games Area (MUGA), a new Forest school class base, new school car park, as well as significant alterations and remodelling of the existing school building to address current accommodation shortfalls. 

Despite being relatively small in scale, this has been a complex project involving archaeology, significant tree constraints, a heavily sloping site, and the challenge of addressing biodiversity net gain (BNG) enhancement on an existing school site that is already undersized. Whilst the principles of BNG are to be supported, existing school sites are a good example where it is not really practical, especially where there is limited opportunity to provide enhancement as every inch of outdoor space has functional use. We hope that the BNG policy will evolve to include some exceptions for existing undersized school sites in the future. 

The project has been developed with SWJ Consulting Ltd, Infrastruct Cs Limited, Heaton Design and Engineering and SKP3 Ltd, with support from Sylva Trees, RSK Biocensus and Oxford Archaeology Limited.