Barry Worth, Business Director at St John’s, explains how his facilities management role changed over the course of the project:

“I was the School Bursar at the time when we were lobbying for public money to build a much needed new school building. Despite the fact that we were trying to run a single comprehensive school between two sites 1.6km apart, it quickly became evident that government funding wasn’t going to happen and that we were going to have to raise the finances ourselves.”

“Our visionary Head Teacher, Dr Patrick Hazlewood, was absolutely committed to bringing the school together on a single site, and he came to the conclusion that as we were a foundation school, meaning that St John’s and its assets are owned by the governing body, we were in prime position to go it alone. However, I don’t think I quite realised what I was letting myself in for when I agreed to take on the management of the project as Business Director!”

Project Facts

Barry Worth was also tasked with ensuring that the school’s ‘public’ spaces would offer the flexibility not only to serve the needs of the student body, but to appeal to external groups and help to bring additional revenue in to the school.

“We had to factor in a whole host of considerations,” explains Barry.  “Obviously the school buildings and furnishings need to be durable enough to stand up to the exacting treatment dished out by enthusiastic teenagers during normal school life, but they also needed to be aesthetically pleasing enough to make other groups be prepared to spend money to use them.”

“We also needed to future-proof our investment in furnishing the school. So durability was a key factor, as was the choice of modular furniture that would allow us to increase and adapt our available workspaces as the changing working patterns of our staff and students demand. For example, having realised that we needed a group of staff to be able work closer together, we have been able easily to reconfigure an open-plan office space, which originally accommodated 14, to take 20 workstations

The school has its own theatre, built to professional standards, with seating for 450, an amphitheatre, purpose-built science and music rooms, a 350 seat restaurant run by a professional chef, a fully-fitted dance studio and a sports hall with four full-sized badminton courts.

With the help of Kinnarps Local Business Executive, Steve Jones, Barry was able to develop plans that maximised the available space and choose furniture that gave the areas ‘for let’ a professional as well as an academic identity.

Barry was particularly pleased to find a furniture supplier that could help to ease the design burden.  He explains: “Steve was incredibly helpful. He took our flat floor plans and produced three dimensional images, which made it much easier for the lay person to understand how the finished space would look and how the modular furniture could be moved and reconfigured to suit the needs of a range of user groups.”

“He even worked with a group of our sixth formers to design their common room and generated images so they could see how their ideas might look in reality.”

Since the new buildings opened, Barry’s remit, as business director, is to generate income for the school, by whatever means are available to him.  As well as a steady flow of people using the well-fitted public spaces, attending evening classes, staging and supporting shows and dining in the high-spec restaurant, he is also finding that his knowledge of creating a well-designed, commercially viable school is in demand.

“I’ve found that many other schools are keen to share our success and to avoid making the mistakes that we have inevitably made during such a steep learning curve.  So I now find myself being hired out as a consultant, advising other schools on fundraising and the planning and building process, so that they benefit from a better designed and more flexible environment too.”