After much wrangling, the build phase of our BSF project at the City of Leicester College finally stated up in April of this year, and is scheduled to be completed by October 2013. Below right you can see the first steels going up for the Business and the Design & Technogy Hub.
 Digging Commences – April 2012 |
 Work in Progress – June 2012 |
We have received some 3D visualisations of the current plans for The City of Leicester College from Miller Consortium (see the post “Latest Floor Plans – circulated for discussion”).
These begin to give a much clearer vision of the character of the proposed new build.
Vehicular Approach to the new building
Below are some more views – click on the thumbnails to get a better look of the current design for TCOLC!
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 Entrance |
 Foyer Section |
 Dining Terrace |
Vehicular Approach |
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 Overview |
 Ariel View |
After some initial feedback from our staff, Miller have produced a first draft of the proposed new school building.
The decision was made to place the new school at the “Wyvern” end of the school plot. This decision along with the need to build around existing structures has dictated the shape of the new build – a capital T with 3 additional wings placed diagonally from the “down stroke”, to catch the best of the sun. The proposed structure has rooming arranged over 3 floors, although 1 floor is “lower ground” and is much smaller than the other 2.
I have attached the architect’s draft floor plans. These plans will be discussed next week in faculty meetings, and comments fed back to Miller.
Staff this week have also been asked to complete a “pre-occupancy” survey, to gauge their opinion of our current situation. If the rest of the staff respond anything like mine, there will be many “poor” and “inadequate” responses! Our present buildings are crumbling away and present many obstacles to good teaching and learning. The sooner we start building the better!
TCOLC SK001 Rev A Lower Ground Floor Plan
The College has drafted what it hopes is its final Accommodation Schedule – the document that details exactly how many rooms in each part of the building and its size in square metres. The total footprint of the proposed build is 13,546 sq m. From this document, the Architects can start designing the actual building.
From the schedule, it is easy to make out the most important design aspect of the new building – that the school will be arranged in paired faculty hubs around large independent work areas.
For instance, Mathematics will be paired with ICT and each will have a suite of rooms located around an independant work area totalling 200 sq metres (equivalent to about 4 standard classrooms). This pattern is repeated through the other hubs. Additionally there will be a staff work area, meeting room and office space in each hub to house Faculty heads, CLT and AchCos.
The faculty pairings for each hub are:
Compared to the original plans from 2005, it seems that the Central area about which the hubs were arranged has shrunk, and the space redistributed within the hubs – the Expressive Arts / Humanities and Design / Business hubs in particular swelling to about twice the size of the others hubs. Although I imagine these areas will be placed towards the centre of the building, allowing them to be zoned for day/night use.
The schedule details quite large classrooms compared to some of the phase 1 schools – with the majority at around 60 square metres each. This is significantly larger than the teaching spaces presently in Gill (around 54 sq metres) Wyvern (around 48 sq metres). There are some smaller classrooms though to cater for smaller groups, and some are planned to be partitioned to make larger teaching spaces as and when required.
The College was told it needed to include a space for a new sports hall in the plans, despite already having a sports hall. BSF rules and regs means that whilst there is no reason to think that the College could not continue to use the Sports Hall it shares with the community, there is no guarantee the agreement will last 25 years. As such, a Sports Hall sized shape will be included, which will be subdivided into a gym and dance studio.
The full Accommodation Schedule – February 2010 is attached here.
Despite some recent scaremongering in the local press, our BSF bid has been accepted by Government and the College is now fully engaged in the process of developing and updating plans and designs for the new build.
The College plans continue to centre around a total rebuild of the school – the new building catering for 1200 11-16 students and a further 370 sixth-form students. We are currently working on the accommodation schedule – the number and size of all the classrooms and facilities. Below is a little sample of the schedule for the maths faculty. The full draft accommodation schedule can be viewed as a separate pdf.
This is very much a draft and is currently being chopped and changed daily (hourly?). It does, however, give an idea of the complexity and detail that needs to go into the plans. I can imagine there will be quite a lot of horse-trading over the next few weeks as the plans get condensed into the space afforded by our funding envelope – roughly 12000 square metres.
Leicester City’s plans for BSF phase 2 have now been presented to Government and will be discussed at Cabinet on 14th December 2009. City officials are very hopeful that the plans will be passed.
This is good news for the City of Leicester College, as we are next in line to be rebuilt. Once these plans are passed by Cabinet, the College will have just 16 weeks to reach a Stage 1 Submission – detailing the project’s scope, elevations plan, outline proposals and cost estimates.
After what seems like an age waiting for BSF, things are set to start moving very fast indeed! (fingers crossed xx)
A quick update of the present state of play:-
Phase 1 of Leicester City’s BSF project was recently completed ahead of schedule and on budget. The City Council are now gearing up to deliver the remainder of the project as quickly as possible over the next 3 years.
The City’s overarching Strategy for Change for phase 2 is “very near readiness for submission to Partnership for Schools”. The sections still needing updating are SEN, Inclusion, Access and Diversity, which are all due to be completed by the end of this month.
There have been some tricky negotiations recently around student numbers to be included in the strategy, as trends suggest secondary school numbers will continue to fall over the next five years, before rising sharply. These negotiations will have a big impact on the City’s BSF project as the Funding Allocation Model centres on projected student numbers.
If the Strategy for Change is accepted by PfS, then our College will most likely be completing a New Project Request towards the end of November, with the design phase commencing soon after that.
There is also a possibility that The City of Leicester College will be designated a Private Finance Initiative, along with Crown Hills School. If this happens, we will need to complete the New Project Request by the end of next month.
Whilst the College’s own plans are dependant on the City Council’s Strategy for Change being accepted by PfS, The City of Leicester College is expecting a funding envelope of around £19.4 million, to be used to finance a complete rebuild of the school. Under current plans, nearly all of our present structures will be demolished with the exception of the Design block. This space would be converted into Business Units, bringing commercial companies onsite and adding a new dimesion to our Business and Enterprise specialism.
It looks like BSF phase 2 is gathering momentum, so watch this space for future BSF news and updates!
“Read the rest” for a quick glossary of BSF jargon used in this post..
Leicester Mercury – Education News BBC Education News – BSF
The City of Leicester College BSF Site 
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