Students help to shape a brand new future school

A group of inventive students all put their heads together at Blakewater Trust College to give designers ideas for one of the next Building Schools for the Future (BSF) schools.

Some of these ideas could end up appearing in the final design for the new east Blackburn community school, which will bring together Blakewater and Crosshill Special School.

It will be built on land off Haslingden Road and is due to open in 2012.

They were Year 7 and 8 students from Blakewater and Crosshill, Year 8 students from Beardwood Humanities College and pupils from Shadsworth Junior School, St Thomas Primary School and Audley Junior School.

Big foam shapes and large Lego-type bricks represented different areas of the new school and the students moved them around an aerial view of the site until they agreed on their favourite school layout along with teachers and the designers from Balfour Beatty Education.

These exciting first artists’ impressions of the new east Blackburn Community School will be unveiled in spring 2010. Balfour Beatty Education was chosen as preferred bidder in October to build the schools and will be producing the final designs.

The company has produced state-of-the-art artists’ impressions of the first two schools set to be re-built or re-modelled – Darwen Vale High School and Pleckgate Mathematics and Computing College in Blackburn. ICT services across all the schools will be delivered in conjunction with Northgate, a leading supplier of ICT solutions to the UK education sector. A Local Education Partnership (LEP) will be formed next month to oversee the programme.

Blakewater head teacher Alan Chambers said: "It was really great to see the young people from all the schools working together to create such a fantastic vision of this future school. They had some great ideas and I'm sure the architects found them very useful.”

Councillor Chris Thayne, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council’s executive member for children’s services, said: “Children and young people have been involved in all the BSF designs in Blackburn with Darwen from the very beginning and this has become a recognised part of good practice.

“Their ideas not only inspire the architects and designers but mean that the students may well see their ideas come to life in their new schools.”

“Their ideas not only inspire the architects and designers but mean that the students may well see their ideas come to life in their new schools.”