The contractor will remodel and refurbish the existing buildings, as well as add new accommodation. This mix of refurb and new build is seen as a model for future cost-saving.
Improving existing buildings enables the school to get what is in effect a new, energy efficient school for substantially less expense than building a completely new facility. School principal Mrs Chris Mann said “The project will enable us to continue providing an excellent all round education for girls from the area of 3-19 years of age within the glorious original buildings but with 21st century facilities.”
Working with the Girls' Day School Trust as sponsor, Wirral Council, and Mott MacDonald as technical advisor, Willmott Dixon will start on site this month, with completion of the build process by October 2012. The project will see the nursery, infant and junior school modernised and linked together by a new three-storey building. This will provide new library and ICT facilities and an assembly hall alongside additional classrooms.
The adjacent secondary school will benefit from the old school hall, built in the 1960s, being replaced by a multi-functional central space offering a theatre, dining room, study areas and a café alongside a new hall. Other buildings on site will be retained but remodelled and refurbished to match the new facilities.
Chief executive for Willmott Dixon’s capital works division, John Frankiewcz, said: “While there will always be a need to create new buildings, clients are being more innovative in how they renew them and this includes mixing refurbishment with new-build to modernise and enlarge the facility. We have shown recently with Macclesfield High School that taking this approach saved over £4m compared to going down a new-build route.”
In a study last year Willmott Dixon found that on Cheshire’s Macclesfield High School, where one third was refurbished and the remaining added as new-build, it resulted in a 22% saving against the cost of an entire new-build, a contract sum of £15m against a new-build price of £19.5m. As local authorities reduce their budgets in light of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the project to modernise Birkenhead High School Academy for Girls could well represent the future of capital spend in education.”
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