Doing the practical

John McAslan and Partners’ RSA Academy is a model of intelligent design: no showy architectural statements but full of features to advance the radical curriculum, prevent bullying and boost harmony

Words Hugh Pearman | Photos Hufton and Crow

Tipton lies in the Black Country, in the centre of a rhomboid defined by Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley and West Bromwich. Nearby modernist architectural diversions include Lubetkin’s decaying Dudley Zoo, Will Alsop’s The Public arts centre, Hodder Associates’  Darlaston Leisure Centre, and Caruso St John’s Walsall Art Gallery. Those in search of retail dystopia will find it in Westfield’s vast Merry Hill Centre to the south. But the feel of Tipton and neighbouring Sandwell is defiantly non-landmark. This is low-density urban sprawl. There are plenty of factories still around, of the metal-bashing variety. The industrial past is apparent also in the various canals and railways that snake through the area. The generous site of the new RSA Academy, designed by John McAslan and Partners, is a long-vanished colliery, with many capped mine shafts buried beneath the surface. The post-coal-and-steel legacy generally translates round here into a lot of open space and a surprising amount of woodland, plus the occasional problem with wandering horses.  Suburban-layout housing in the immediate vicinity of the Academy dates mostly from the inter-war years to the 1970s.

So much for the physical context: but the £24m RSA Academy has another context, that of its curriculum. This is a flagship project of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, Britain’s oldest think tank – or generator of good ideas, if you prefer. The RSA is well known as a champion of design through its faculty of Royal Designers for Industry (the school uniforms are designed with the help of Margaret Howell, for instance, and several other RDIs including graphic designer David Hillman are involved), but it has long been in the business of raising educational standards, with practical skills to the forefront. Having developed its unconventional ‘Opening Minds’ curriculum, based on five sets of real-life competencies – Learning, Citizenship, Relating to People, Managing Situations, and Managing Information – it went the logical next step and bought into a real-life Academy, a £2m sponsorship, to practise what it preaches.

Here things had to get a lot less woolly. It boils down to longer school days (starting with breakfast with the teachers), three-hour teaching sessions in cross-curricular modules, variety in teaching methods (sometimes several teachers will teach a whole year group at once) a five-term year, three separate ‘schools’ in different subject groups, and a house system to bring pupils together across school years. Within reason, pupils are entered for exams when they are ready, not just because they happen to have reached a certain age. The aim is project-based learning that fosters understanding rather than simply the spouting of facts.

Some 200 other schools around the country now claim to follow the Opening Minds curriculum structure for the first three years of secondary school, but to date these have not been very closely monitored.  The RSA Academy is designed specifically around the curriculum and has become the headquarters of the initiative.  The first step was to turn the existing 1950s Willingsworth High School on the site into the Academy via a light refurb (and the necessary big curriculum shift) over the course of the summer holidays: it first opened in September 2008, pretty much as groundbreaking started on the all-new school at the other end of the site. 

The McAslan-designed academy, then, is the physical expression of an educational approach which moves into it, fully-formed, this month. Given which, it is not surprising that it is effectively a built diagram.

There are no frills here, no swoopy shapes, no spectacular atria, not even a large dining hall.  It is driven by its function. Partly this comes down to value engineering – the RSA had hoped to leverage more sponsorship but found this difficult in the economic climate, and cuts had to be made. But superior space standards were maintained. The classrooms, for instance, are 70m2 rather than the state-recommended 56m2, and they open up into the one next door by means of beefy folding acoustic walls. This way, you can get the equivalent of three classes’ worth, 90 pupils, in one space. To keep costs tight, this meant losing one classroom and one science lab from the original design.

Another economy meant that suspended ceilings were installed rather than expensively-finished exposed concrete soffits, though perforation permits some of the heat-regulating characteristics of the precast concrete structure. A natural ventilation system, driven by rooftop wind-catchers, draws in air through acoustic baffles beneath classroom windows.
A simple spine arrangement has the ‘public’ section at one end, containing sports hall, multi-purpose theatre and two-storey library, behind reception. This part can be kept open when the rest of the school is closed. Along the spine is the dining hall (not big, they eat in shifts) and a sequence of specialist teaching rooms. Three finger blocks springing from the spine, separated by landscaped courtyards, correspond to the general classrooms of the three ‘schools’ – broadly humanities, science, and languages – as well as the schools’s three houses, with the oldest pupils at the top. These blocks have generous deck-access balconies, so avoiding internal corridors. “They were also a means to buy back space for the classrooms,” comments McAslan’s partner in charge, James Dixon. This arrangement worked fine on the rainy day I was there. Teaching can also take place in the courtyards (permanent fixed outdoor seating is provided) and on roof terraces, though presumably not in the rain.  Open-plan unisex toilet lobbies in bright primary colours might be a shock for some, but the openness, like the lack of corridors, is an anti-bullying measure.

McAslan drew up the design to stage F, and was then novated to contractor Willmott Dixon in the usual design-and-build arrangement. The RSA had wanted a traditional contract, but this was vetoed by the Department of Education. There were other wrinkles along the way, such as the original cladding and landscape contractors going bust. The architects, meantime, had to deal with the design input not only of pupils and the very engaged head, Michael Gernon, but also the design gurus at the RSA.  But the straightforward design could absorb all that.  The front elevations of the two outer classroom blocks carry mesh supports for climbing plants (no maintenance-dependent ‘green walls’ here) while the central one bears a large outdoor electronic screen. This is not a building that aims to grab you by the lapels visually, though it sits back congenially enough behind the ‘village green’ with its cricket pitch at the front. The old school behind will be demolished to make other sports pitches.

As a practice, McAslan now has a fair bit of educational experience, ranging from a pro-bono school in Malawi with Arup, to two Harris academies – one brand new, the other a refurbishment – plus a clutch of BSF schools and one in Scotland. They know their onions: for this is an intelligent school, a model of clarity, rather than a self-consciously showy one.  With monument-building in education now officially discouraged, the curriculum-led RSA Academy, located well away from the bastions of privilege, is curiously appropriate for our times.