Corbets Tey School – New Classrooms

Corbets Tey School is a popular, forward looking school catering for the needs of over 100 pupils aged 4 – 16 with Complex Learning Needs. All of the pupils have differing personal educational needs with learning challenges including autism, and a number of medical syndromes. The school holds Specialist Status in Communication and Interaction, and is becoming a Centre of Excellence in support of its own pupils and the local mainstream school and college community.

As such, its popularity and role within the local educational infrastructure meant that expansion was required to provide additional teaching space. To facilitate this, Corbets Tey commissioned Essex educational architects M+C to design and deliver a further 4 new classrooms within a two-storey extension to an existing building.

The design reflected the existing facilities, and maximised usage within a compact site to provide significantly increased facilities for such a busy school. Windows on dual elevations for each of the new classrooms provides a high degree of natural light enhancing the airy feel to the extension.

In addition to the new extension, significant remodelling was required to existing facilities to enable the extension. Major electrical upgrades were also undertaken (delivered directly by the London Borough of Havering, but coordinated by M+C to coincide dovetail with other site operations) in order to double electrical capacity on site.

The site is tightly packed with limited access to reach the location of the extension. A temporary road and compound facilities were created to ease these difficulties and ensure that the site could be secured from the day-to-day operations of the school. In addition to these limitations, 2014 proved to be an exceptionally wet year. Despite these challenges, the scheme was delivered on-time.