Chaucer Business and Enterprise College

An extensive two-phase refurbishment of a challenging site that became a Building Schools for the Future 'quick win' scheme for Sheffield City Council. Designed by Sheffield Design and Project Management.

Chaucer School is a mixed comprehensive school with 1050 pupils on roll. It is located in an area of acute deprivation in the north of Sheffield. This area suffered rapid economic decline in the 1980s and 90s as a result of the collapse of the steel industry. Currently, 70 per cent of its pupils are from the Southey Ward, the fourth most educationally deprived in the country.

The school was originally built as separate boys’ and girls’ schools. One school fronted onto the Halifax Road, the main arterial road leading to the M1 motorway. The other school faced Wordsworth Avenue, and was part of a district shopping centre, now in serious decline, although there are ambitious plans for its regeneration. The school operated as one facility in the 1970s. As the school buildings were separated by approximately 200m, this led to significant management problems, particularly during class changeover.

The existing Wordsworth Avenue buildings were designed by architects YRM in the 1960s and were more extensive than those on Halifax Road. They were well designed and constructed with a concrete frame, and had some architectural merit. In contrast, the Halifax Road buildings were of less substantial construction and had aged poorly.

Early in 1999, Sheffield LEA commissioned Sheffield Design and Project Management to develop a scheme to consolidate all the facilities onto the main
Wordsworth Avenue part of the site. Funding totalling £7.4m was available from a variety of central government allocations, and a further £120,000 from the school’s devolved formula capital. Because the funding was insufficient to refurbish the majority of the existing accommodation, it was envisaged that this would form a second phase as soon as funding became available. Work on the first phase started in May 2001 and was completed in February 2003.

An opportunity to fund the remainder of the work in a second phase emerged soon after Sheffield was selected by the (then) DfES to become a pathfinder for Building Schools for the Future. The government wanted to undertake a number of ‘quick win’ projects, and the advanced state of planning for the refurbishment project resulted in Chaucer being awarded a further £8.2m of funding. Design work on this phase started in July 2004, work on site commenced in May 2005, and the whole project was completed in October 2006.