We Need To Talk About Modular

Anyone with an interest in the education sector couldn’t have missed Scape’s recent report warning that we need 2,122 new schools by 2020. With this equating to us building two new schools a day, it’s no surprise the report has put the industry in panic mode. Even the EFA’s Mike Green has admitted that we need 500,000 new school places in Primary education by 2010.

With funding unlikely to rise significantly it’s clear that for speed, cost, AND quality reasons we need to build using offsite techniques – or to use the received term: ‘Modular’.  It’s something we’ve been doing with increasing panache for the past decade and it feels like the time is right for the offsite industry to step up a gear.

While public opinion has gone through the ringer on modular school buildings, recently a much more positive outlook has taken hold. Schools like Lime Tree Primary Academy have shown us that modular schools can be bespoke, look beautiful, and have an incredible impact on the students and teachers who use them. Large school building programmes like the Priority School Building Programme (PSBP) have shown us the positive impact modular build and standardised design can have on cost and build time when it’s used to tackle a large number of schools packaged into a single programme of work.

So what’s stopping us from building 2,122 new modular schools in the next four years? For me there are three things getting in the way.

First, the key to making modular build efficient is volume. We need to stop looking at schools as one off local projects and start looking at them as regional programmes of work. When schools are bundled together we can better manage how resources are used, components are replicated, and implement lessons learned so that each successive school is built better, cheaper, and quicker. Standardised designs thrive when designers are working across a large number of similar projects. We saw this recently at Atkins with our work with Laing O’Rourke on seven new schools in Yorkshire through the PSBP. We used a component-based solution, recognising that a school can be expressed as a number of standardised spaces constructed of repeatable components. Replicating the same building components in this way allowed us to deliver an affordable, efficient solution, while maintaining the versatility to create high quality designs and a unique character for each school.

The second issue is finding the land to build all these new schools. It’s not that the land to build doesn’t exist. Loads of organisations are actively looking to sell off underused land, from TfL and Network Rail to the MOD. In the education sector itself, there are further education institutions looking to sell off land as they consolidate into ‘super colleges’. What’s missing is our ability to identify where these parcels of land are and where they’re best placed to deliver a new school(s). And then once they’re identified, working quickly to get the land ready to be built on. When we were working on Dean Trust Ardwick, now Manchester’s fastest ever built school, we had a number of challenges: contaminated brown field land, protected species and mobile phone mast relocation. To make sure this didn’t slow us down, we worked on site clearance and remediation in tandem with the design, with construction of the school starting in the factory before site clearance was complete and modules being delivered to finished areas of site while other areas were still being worked on.

Finally, the flipside of building larger volumes of modular schools is our capacity to do so. Does the UK market really have the capacity to deliver two new schools a day? Honestly, I don’t know if we do. But we have to remember, we’re not the only country doing modular build. There are factories overseas capable of producing modular components in much larger quantities than we can in the UK. And what’s more there may be investors out there willing to fund the delivery of these schools, so that we pay them off over time and don’t fall over the hurdle of funding over 2,000 new schools ourselves on a diminishing short-term budget.

So if we want to make sure the 729,000 additional pupils local authorities estimate we’ll have in education by 2020 have somewhere to learn, we shouldn’t scratching our heads for new ways of doing things. We just need to look at a delivery model that is already working – modular build – and find ways of refining quality and scaling-up capacity.

This Article first appeared in Building magazine in November 2016