Frederick Bremer School, Waltham Forest BSF

Frederick Bremer School was built as part of the first wave Building Schools for the Future programme (BSF) in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Opened in September 2008 the school was developed to join together two Walthamstow schools, Aveling Park and Warwick Boys. The school was built as part of a redevelopment of the former Hawker Siddley factory site that included the provision of 256 residential units.

The school has a simple layout of two three storey teaching wings that are linked by a triple height internal street. Floor to ceiling windows along the southern elevation of the interior street not only draw light into the building but also act to enliven the exterior, connecting inside activity to outside spaces. The landscaping includes a paved courtyard on two levels, integrating an amphitheatre and exterior prayer room.

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Waltham Forest Borough Council initiated the use of DQI at the Briefing stage. A diverse group of respondents were engaged, representing a good cross section of the end users. These included the Head Teacher, Governor, Head of English, SEN co-ordinator, ICT Manager,  Pupils, CABE Enabler and Bursar.

In the briefing workshop the reasons behind participation in the DQI session were made clear. The facilitator began with an exercise to get people thinking about space and their needs by drawing on good and bad examples of design from respondents own experiences.

This icebreaker got respondents thinking about design and its effects in more detail and eased the way into a conversation about their requirements for the new school. The briefing stage workshop was completed offline to ensure that all respondents’ attention was engaged in the conversation rather than directed at a computer screen. The results of this session fed into the development of the brief for the Frederick Bremer which was then passed onto the bidding contractors.

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A DQI Mid Design workshop was held at Waltham Forest Town Hall to evaluate bidders designs.

This second DQI workshop was held over a full day and participants were reminded about what they had said at the Briefing DQI workshop. Each bidding design team presented their schemes to the school who evaluated their designs using the DQI mid-design assessment tool. Bidders, who had each been informed directly through the brief about end-user needs, requirements and aspirations, presented their designs to talk to the outputs from the initial DQI Briefing session. The results of respondents DQI assessment informed the selection of the preferred bidder.

Using DQI as part of a competitive bid process should be handled with caution, as it is important that DQI is not seen as a generic scoring tool, but that it is applied more subtly. In this case, because the school and the local authority had really thought about their requirements through a comprehensive DQI briefing stage workshop the results were successful. Further, the result of the evaluative DQI was not the only measure that influenced the selection of the preferred bidder.

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A longer version of this case study can be found on the CABE website.

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