live projects

Heathermount School

 

Heathermount The Learning Centre is owned by the Disabilities Trust and provides specialist education for students aged 5 to 19 with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. 

The Disabilities Trust applied for, and gained, an Outline Planning Consent for a new teaching building in 2007.  It was important to maintain a live Consent on this Green Belt site.  Wyatt MacLaren applied for renewal of this Consent in 2010 and carried out a review of Heathermount’s current and future needs during late 2010 and early 2011.  The practice then worked on a feasibility study to consider the spatial requirements and a strategy for the site, and compiled a brief for the project in liaison with the school and the Disabilities Trust.

The key requirement is to provide permanent teaching space for the older students, the Upper School and 6th form, currently based in temporary classrooms or within the White House.  There is also a requirement for specialist teaching areas for music and science, design and technology and art, for shared therapy spaces and an activity space suitable for drama, movement, assembly or social purposes.  The upgraded facilities are to provide up to 50 full time places and up to 30 sessional or part time places.

The existing buildings include a grand Edwardian house, various contemporaneous outbuildings, a late 20th century building for the lower school, a system built gymnasium and a number of temporary buildings.  These are set in extensive grounds and include terraced gardens to the main house.  The scheme strategy was evolved, to convert and upgrade the useful existing outbuildings, and to insert a new teaching building, designed around a courtyard.  The development of new external teaching spaces, such as for Art or Design and Technology, and the new teaching building courtyard, develops the existing pattern of buildings set in landscaped surroundings. 

An application for detailed Planning Consent has been submitted to the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.  It has been recommended for approval subject only to referral to the Government Office for the South East with regard to the site’s Green Belt status.  It is the case that the current proposed scheme is in the same location on the site as the indicative scheme covered by the existing Outline Consent, is almost totally within the same footprint, is considerably lower in height and of less gross floor area.  It is considered to be of less visual impact than the Outline scheme and to cause no significant loss of amenity to neighbours.

Wyatt MacLaren are currently developing the scheme detail with the client and school, taking into account the need for a robust design which is also life enhancing, responding to acoustic and other sensory issues relating to ASD, aiming to optimise the teaching and learning environment.