The RAAC catastrophe is a chance to use co-location to reimagine local schools as a community’s beating heart

If you follow these things, and I do, you’ll remember that the BSF programme, begun in 2005, was due to finish this year. But when the coalition government took power in May 2010, education secretary Michael Gove scrapped the nationwide project and focused his department on driving through the London-biased Free Schools programme (of the 550 free schools open today, a third are in the English capital).

It’s fair to assume had BSF been completed, the RAAC catastrophe we face today – largely a question of maintenance and repair - would never have arisen. After all, scrapping BSF meant halting improvement plans for more than 700 schools throughout England. Enough said?

Not quite. Because despite the upheaval - lancing RAAC from schools will probably mean renewed exposure to dormant asbestos as well – we have been presented with a genuine opportunity to reconsider how our school estates can better serve communities.

In many ways, RAAC has highlighted just how outdated our relationship is with our local schools. Why for example, are schools shut for almost two months during the summer? Why do they close so early during term time? And why, given their footprint size (pretty big, mostly), aren’t their air-rights  - most schools are low-rise - given over to housing? At Pollard Thomas Edwards, we’ve proven, at the Netley Campus in Euston, for example, that co-location works as a cross-subsidy model (and don’t listen to critics who cry ‘Overlook!’. In England, most urban schools rub shoulders with housing. It’s practically a template.)

In short, if we recast school estates – with their sports and playgrounds, assembly halls, science labs, art workshops, canteens, kitchens and sometimes special functions, like theatres, for example – as under-utilised mixed-use wonders, we find ourselves facing a very different, and far more agreeable, challenge. What, we can ask ourselves, is the best way to place schools at the heart of communities and neighbourhoods, so that everyone – children, parents, grandparents, and anyone who lives nearby – can benefit from its resources? To play evening sport, partake in life-long learning, or go see the latest take on Waiting for Godot. Or maybe even enjoy a meal in the school canteen-cum-pop-up restaurant.

In terms of co-location, our Deptford Lounge project from 2012, goes quite a bit further than Netley. It combines a primary academy, district library, community centre and artists’ studios with affordable homes (It also made possible the adjacent Market Yard – a restored Victorian carriage ramp incorporating 14 commercial spaces).

The secret of that project’s remarkable success is people – and the trust they place in each other. As the building’s facility manager told us during a recent revisit, that culture of trust extends to relationships with the library service (“we check in with each other all the time, support each other, help each other with activities”); the public (“we run ‘pay what you think’ theatre performances so anyone can afford them”); and artists too, who are given free use of facilities in lieu of payment if they run community workshops.

In London, co-location – as promoted by The Mayor’s 2021 London Plan (Policy E7) – means knitting industrial and residential uses to form mixed-use developments on brownfield sites. It’s a policy we’re fully behind and which delivered, according to a report by Turley, more than 500 homes over the past year.

Co-locating housing with schools is a model we continue to work with and develop at PTE. At Bow Garden Square in Tower Hamlets (2020), for example, the plan is centred around a courtyard providing a new two form entry primary school - with housing above. It also incorporates a mosque and a terrace of affordable homes.

Funding models grounded in the community and tied to housing and other community essentials, we think, offer a durable, viable future for our towns and cities, that past models – PFI for example – have struggled to satisfy.

As we build back better – remember that, from 2021? - and re-imagine how town and city centres can be revived post Brexit, post-pandemic and now post-RAAC, making schools the new high streets, seems glaringly obvious.

Rory Olcayto, writer and critic at Pollard Thomas Edwards