Wintringham Primary Academy opened last year at the top of a hill in the Cambridgeshire town of St Neots. The school’s positioning was deliberate, says Nigel Hugill, chief executive of Urban&Civic, its developer. At about three or four metres, the incline is only slight – it’s in Cambridgeshire, after all – “but if you’re five, that’s twice your height,” Hugill says. “Watching the children run up towards the school on the first day was a certain thrill.”
Wellcome Trust-owned Urban&Civic wants such schools to be a focal point for its schemes – not only in terms of their physical positioning, such as Wintringham, but also in what they bring to the communities the company helps build through its strategic land investments.
The company has now built or planned 18 primary schools and six secondary schools around the country. Hugill believes that is more than any other private sector company, and that its next, at its new neighbourhood of Houlton in Rugby, is the country’s first secondary school built directly by the private sector.
“We’re unusual in that our preference, if we can, is to build them ourselves as opposed to giving money to education authorities,” Hugill says. “And even if we do, we are very closely involved in that process.”
Now, as the company prepares for the opening of Houlton School in September, Hugill and his team are thinking of how the Covid-19 pandemic is reshaping communities and the provision of education, and working out how to respond. The schools in Urban&Civic’s projects are s106 requirements, Hugill notes – but to describe their provision as a requirement arguably doesn’t do justice to the chief executive’s view of them. “It’s a role, and it’s also a responsibility,” he says.
Long-term vision
Hugill’s interest in education pre-dates his setting up of Urban&Civic. “When I was running [developer] Chelsfield, I always thought I had a school in me,” he says.
His first was at the Paddington Basin scheme, where Chelsfield built a new school for Westminster Academy. “Large-scale, urban developments are quite disruptive,” Hugill says. “We wanted to give something back.” Designed by architects at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the school was the first to be shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, in 2008.
Hugill describes schools as underlining a “civic importance… which goes beyond just the education” in the master developer’s schemes. “For us, schools are statements of how the project stands and will be, statements about how much we care because of the fact that we actively want to be involved with them,” he says.
Indeed, Urban&Civic’s work doesn’t end when the school opens. The company is involved in the governance of the schools it develops – sometimes with staff members acting as governors, sometimes as trustees and, in the case of Houlton, with the company itself acting as a co-sponsor.
“It links from that statement of intent,” says Johanne Thomas, a member of Urban&Civic’s communications, communities and partnerships team. “What the school signifies on day one of your development – in front of your partners and stakeholders, but also in front of your early communities – is that it says ‘this development is going to deliver infrastructure’.”
That, in turn, encourages a sense of trust, the team says – demonstrating to families moving into the scheme’s homes that the developer is committed to the community.
“It’s about engaging early with stakeholders, changing how people view us as developers and starting to build relationships so that when schools come on to the landscape and multi-academy trusts come in as the operators, we are really interesting to them,” Thomas says.
“We are developers and we are commercially minded and highly skilled, yet we’re talking about communities and the importance of education and sustainability. And what we do is bond over that shared vision in this area for the long term.”
A piece of history
That shared vision has to reflect an area’s heritage, even as Urban&Civic creates new communities.
In doing that, the company aims to use its schools to set the tone of its projects. “We like to have a school opening when the first houses are built, which is extremely unusual,” Hugill says. “There are some challenges around that because it means in the first instance, the schools are not fully occupied. But the problem with the reverse, which is what most housebuilders would try and do – push things to the back and make a contribution as late as they can – is that doesn’t help define the place.”
In Houlton, the new secondary school is being built around Rugby Radio Station’s Grade II listed building, from where the first transatlantic phone call was made to Houlton in Maine in 1927 (Hugill struggles to think of another place in the UK named after a town in the US). The radio station’s transmission hall is being turned into a new art space and drama studio, and the school’s house teams will be named after famous individuals in the communications industry.
Morgan Sindall started construction just days before the UK’s first Covid-19 lockdown last March but the building is still set to be delivered on time for the next academic year, with 1,200 secondary school places as well as a sixth form.
The school – developed as a joint venture between Urban&Civic, Aviva Investors, Warwickshire County Council and the Department for Education and run by the Transforming Lives Educational Trust – is the second of four planned for 6,200-home Houlton.
“We’re not just a moment in time – build and leave an amazing school,” Thomas says. “We’re in these areas for the next 10 to 15 years… You could move to Houlton and educate your child from birth through to waving them off to university or into work, because we’ve got a nursery, primary school and secondary school with a sixth form within a mile of your front door.”
For Rebecca Britton, also in the company’s communities and partnerships team, the question driving Urban&Civic’s work is “how can we use the development for the wider communities to think about aspiration, engagement, opportunities of development coming forward?” The company’s schools build on that, she adds.
“When we have the school on the ground, that gets a big boost because you then start to think about how you apply that to the kids that you’ve got as residents, as well as those in the neighbouring communities.”
Making a beeline
The goal is to create what Britton calls “active citizens”, and to encourage that from as early as the company can.
“We design green spaces so people can lead healthy lives. We design cycle ways so that people can get out of cars. Kids are so responsive to that stuff and they love it,” Britton says.
“When we start to explore with the teachers how our ecologies are designed with beelines, how we’ve got particular ecology habitats, it makes the curriculum incredibly real. Rather than learning about these things in concept, [pupils] have the opportunity to safely walk out of the school and explore the plants and species around there.”
And the ability to introduce students to the Urban&Civic business itself, not to mention its partners – the company has invited architecture firms to give presentations to students on their work – could just help to inspire the next generation of real estate developers.
“We know that if children are exposed to businesses around them, their aspiration rises and they are more likely to get a good route into employment,” Britton says. “That’s really important if we want to create young, active, vibrant citizens of the future, which will then only serve our developments better because we’ve got those active citizens within them. It’s a mutually beneficial circle that we’re very happy to do heavy lifting and start to create.”
Events of the past year have driven wide-ranging debates over the future designs and uses of our homes and workplaces. Will the pandemic also shift how schools are viewed? “To the extent that the schools are seen as bastions of the community and community is more important, I think there’s a reinforcement of that,” says Hugill.
And that significance goes far beyond the company’s dedication to building an impressive building. For the chief executive, schools are more than the bricks and mortar: “They’re a collection of children’s futures,” he says. Now that’s planning for the long term.
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