Wintringham Primary Academy

The three-form entry school is a two-storey building that accommodates 708 students alongside 60 teachers and support staff. The academy contributes to a new public plaza. Its place in the community is further enhanced by sharing its facilities such as the hall and studio.

Classrooms are clustered into groups of three and arranged around a central woodland grove, a landscaped learning resource that embodies the ethos of the academy and the wider masterplan.

This design also supports learning in the round, an organisational spatial concept developed by us that provides a framework for the efficient arrangement of classroom clusters and other support spaces. This not only places similar age groups together to foster support, but also allows for shared facilities to be clustered, arranged and easily accessed from all classroom spaces.

Impressively for a building designed in 2017, it exceeds the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge for embodied carbon for new build schools.

The use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) for the entire building’s structure and interior offers a comforting environment whilst making construction easier, faster, safer and more efficient. The superstructure sequesters 166 metric tonnes of carbon (A1-A5), with 49% of the carbon impact of a RIBA 2030 ‘business as usual’ school. It also reduced time on site, created a safer and cleaner working environment and allowed greater control over service coordination.

The structural efficiency of CLT enabled the creation of a slender roof form that gently follows the contour of the school’s avocado-shaped plan. Its generous overhanging canopy not only provides solar shading to rooms but also weather protection to the outdoor learning spaces below. Through collaboration with the school’s teachers, we were also able to carefully design in a series of ‘soft spots’ within the engineered timber structure that allow for spatial changes to adapt to the school’s future growth and evolving curriculum.

Ceramic tiles wrap around the building’s timber structure. The glazed ceramic panels draw inspiration from the seasonal colours found within nature and provide wayfinding and identity to the different year groups.

View our detailed Sustainability Impact Summary for the school here.

Choosing a CLT framing system was critical because it allowed the full frame to be erected within 2.5 months and reduced the cost of the foundation package significantly.

Wintringham Primary Academy’s motto is to ‘nurture, inspire, flourish’, and with this smart, efficient and caring building, we feel confident that the school now has the environment to do just that.