Students challenged to design their own school

Students from two schools will have the opportunity to design their own schools after winning the Design my Learning Space competition earlier this month.

Eight schools across the UK took part in the competition that involved students proposing design schemes for their own schools.

Lauriston Primary School in north London and Hagley Catholic Upper School in Worcestershire were selected as the winners by a panel of specialist school architects. Partners on the contest were EC Harris, RIBA, Carleton Furniture, Steljes and Surface to Air.

The winning students worked with architects and designers at BSEC to develop their ideas into real proposals.

Simon Lucas, head of Education and Children’s Services at EC Harris, said: “The competition is fun and involves a lot of hard work in a short space of time.

“It’s a special competition for many different reasons. It gives the young people involved the chance to work with a real architect on their ideas and then present these ideas to a judging panel who will assess them against the kind of criteria that a real client might use – this makes the process real for them on various levels.

“The young people involved learn about how to work to a strict brief, articulate why they make the decisions they do and also see how a design brief is worked up into a practical solution which is both innovative and creative,” he said.

The designs were judged on how well they combined innovation and creativity to meet the brief.

Lucas said: “Overall, the results from every team were excellent and with such a bounty of good ideas, picking the final winners was testing. Here’s to next year’s competition.”