Curriculum pie charts

Client Advisers for Acland Burghley secondary school, Camden, London

Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme BSF intended to transform today’s schools today to work well when the building work is completed and to still be relevant for the next twenty to fifty years. How is this gap to the future first envisioned and then managed in a working school?

We took Acland Burghley’s current tabulated timetable for the whole school role, which sets out who sits where, when and studying what and we redrew it to make it work as an informative and illustrative pie-chart (popularised by Florence Nightingale) which we could manipulate through conversations with the client project team to show a variety of relationships between different subjects and the spaces they are taught in and between different activities which we could see were common across subjects.

The distinction is drawn between different kinds of learning and teaching and the most appropriate spaces for them to unfold in rather than the specific curriculum learned and taught on a subject by subject basis. One kind of space for the singular condition of General Learning shared across all subjects, with sub-variations for group sizes, pedagogical method and other key environmental criteria and spaces for the multiple requirements of Specialist Learning, specific to particular subjects, laboratories, dance studios etc.

The results lead to an informed but flexible transformation of the ways the many parts of a school can be disposed and how they might interrelate, now, soon and in the future.

Service: Architects

Location: Camden, UK

Client: Acland Burghley, UCL

Cost: £26.1m

Dates: 2010

To Live In   To Learn In   To Work In   To Play In