St. Polycarp’s RC Primary School

The main design focus at St. Polycarp’s RC Primary School was always to create an attractive and welcoming building per the aspirations of the school’s stakeholders. To achieve this, the design team remodeled the existing facilities and extended the school buildings to provide modern teaching, social, and administration spaces. This included new teaching areas that encourage group learning and school integration, state-of-the-art IT and Food Technology facilities, new multi-purpose hall spaces that serve both the school and the local community, and a compact layout to minimize circulation and in which new and existing buildings and external spaces are logically and strongly related.

Alongside our usual mechanical, electrical, and public health design work, Elementa Consulting strongly emphasized a sustainable, environmentally sound school that achieved a BREEAM Very Good rating. This is notably facilitated through the use of Dynamic Thermal Modelling of the school, allowing the design to achieve BREEAM credit HEA10 through maximization of thermal comfort within the school building. Our approach uses passive design to ensure maximum energy efficiency and sustainability with minimum capital expenditure: using a comprehensive natural ventilation strategy using stack effect cross ventilation in the classrooms provides an airy environment that is at once welcoming and comfortable, as well as aiding learning and development.

The ventilation strategy is mostly simple opening windows, with each room provided with an interactive CO₂ detector giving teaching staff RED/AMBER/GREEN color-coded feedback on conditions and the added benefit of being able to control their environment.

Ground Floor classrooms of the two-story section required a more complex stack effect ventilation strategy. Again in this instance, we have looked to minimize automatic control by using CO₂ indicators but with automatic controls for the stack effect solution to ensure its correct operation.