Based in Hampshire, The Loddon School serves students between the age of eight and 19 with a wide range of complex needs. Offering year-round provision, the requirements of staff and management are unlike that of many educators around the country, which meant that the process of future-proofing the school was all the more complicated. Principal Dr Gill Barrett discusses the process in more detail below.
As Loddon School approached its 30th year, the question was looming large in senior leaders minds: “ What would we look like in another 30 years?”. Was the school truly ready for this next stage? The school was spending money on repairing and preserving their buildings, and with the continually changing needs of the SEND student population there was a need to think differently.
Challenged by the trustees the leadership team came up with their vision for the school environment. The key desires were for all children to be housed on one site, for school population to remain similar with all houses having between four to five children and young people for living and learning in. Critically all accommodation must be of a similar standard, at least to that of Cherrywood standard (two bungalows built in 2015). These homes have en-suite bathrooms, are light and airy, and designed specially for autistic children with severe and complex needs. The final element of the vision was to remove all cars and vehicles from the main area of the site where the children were.
With the help of some expert designers and planners the school created the design of a village green around the original school building with the new building circulating the green. Children would move from old buildings into new homes over two phases and the old buildings on site would be recreated into a new therapies suite, training centre and administration offices.
After the planning applications, tendering and selection of the construction company the first phase started in March 2020. Days before the outbreak of a global pandemic.
Although there was a slight delay on the finish time of the project the build ran very smoothly and the young people move into their new homes in June. The additional space for the sensory room, the design of the ceiling forming day and night areas and the outdoor covered area have added greatly to the overall living environment.
Having completed phase one the school now is refurbishing the old ‘Eagles House’ accommodation to become the new therapies suite, sensory room, sensory integration room, massage room, work space for the occupational therapist and the speech and language therapies and a central base for specialist resource creation, has started. The new car park has been created and slowly the ‘village green’ area is becoming vehicle free.
As with any project the need to finance the second phase of the building has delayed the continuous flow of the project. Although all Loddon students are paid for by local authorities as it is a charity and not a maintained school, Loddon gets no funding for capital projects and relies heavily on gifts and active fund raising. In a year when the government has published a national strategy for autism it is a great shame that innovative work is slowed due to the need to fund raise in order to provide the education and care services for the most vulnerable autistic children and young people in England.
The school must now raise a further £1.3 million to complete the project and have sought advice and help of their patron, local businesses and larger national companies. After a global pandemic the news is generally not great but the school remain hopeful. The new buildings will further transform the lives of the younger children in the school aged eight to 16. The houses in phase two do not need to be as large or have as many specialist life skills teaching areas, as the children will move into the current four bungalows when they are older and ready for this next stage in their education.
Planning permission for phase two has now been applied for. Three bungalows with a large dining/mulituse hall housed in a front atrium.
When the second phase is complete we will have a school which will prepare children and young people to cope better into adulthood and give them the quality of life they deserve. The outreach work from the school with its redesigned training centre will help to deliver some of the objectives outlined in the National Strategy, especially widening society’s understanding of autism and the diversity of the spectrum.
