A number of schools in Barnet, Greenwich, Lambeth, Newham and Waltham Forest are the first in London to benefit from the UK Government’s £2.4 billion Priority School Building Programme.

The scheme’s main objective is to provide best-in-class educational facilities that meet the demands of a growing local population, while maintaining the high standards of schooling, for which the borough is already known, and further developing the borough’s reputation as a desirable area in which to live and work.

OVERVIEW
The purpose of this circa £12.3 million project is to build a new school with capacity for 630 primary schoolchildren and 39 nursery places.

Commissioned by Kier Construction on behalf of Barnet Council, the brief to SDS was to supply and install surface water management and sustainable drainage systems. Construction began in March 2013, with the school opening in 2014.

WHAT SDS DID
SDS was required to supply and install surface water management and sustainable drainage systems. SDS worked with Kier Construction to design a cost-effective alternative system to the concrete tank which had been specified originally in favour of a system that would be easier and cheaper to construct and install.

The system handles not only the surface water runoff from the school and its new all-weather football pitch, but also from new housing developments, including a 138-home plot of land on the former Inglis Barracks.

RESULTS
The project was managed under the terms of the SABS legislation effective from April 2014, whereby responsibility for the adoption and maintenance of SuDS is allocated to Unitary and County Councils Planning Teams.

The sports pitch has been built to ‘Sport England’ (formerly the ‘English Sports Council’) specification that demands strict adherence to very specific, tight tolerances. Working with national governing bodies for sport, such as the ECB, RFU and FA, Sport England has produced detailed guidance on how sports clubs can minimise the risk of flooding through good design and site preparation.

The system has been successfully integrated with a swale with a capacity of at least 500m3, and with an area available underneath the all-weather sports pitch with a capacity of at least 3,000m³.

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