Stoneham Park Primary Academy

Structural Timber Awards 2020 – Education Project of the Year / Project of the Year / Contractor of the Year / Pioneer Award – Shortlisted
LABC Awards 2021 – Non-residential: Best Public Building Award – regional winner (south-east)
People and Places awards – shortlisted finalist (national)

Stoneham Park Primary Academy is a new 1.5FE primary school for 315 pupils built to serve a housing development of 1100 new homes in Eastleigh, Hampshire. The two-hectare school site was carefully planned to locate the building on existing ‘brown field’ land to the south with playing fields on ‘green field’ land to the north. The new school addresses the proposed Local Centre and adjoins a mature parkland at the heart of the development. The main school hall and adjacent facilities have been designed to encourage community use and access.

The new school is a pilot project for the development of a standard design model for new primary schools in Hampshire using offsite construction. The two-storey building is conceived as a compact and energy efficient form, modest in scale and future-proofed for expansion. The flexible design can be adapted for different school sizes ranging from 1.5FE to 3FE and to suit a variety of sites and contexts. The building construction adopts ‘Fabric First’ principles to provide good thermal comfort and indoor air quality with low energy running costs. This is achieved by adopting triple glazing, super-insulated and airtight construction combined with Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR). Photo Voltaic (PV) panels to the roof of the building offset electrical energy use on site and further reduce CO2. Skylights and light shafts provide natural daylight and ventilation to deep-plan circulation areas and the LRC/Library ‘heart’ of the school.

The building superstructure uses a unique and sustainable Streif timber frame cassette system manufactured off-site. Accurate and fast assembly of the frame on site ensured the project was completed on time, on budget and to a very high standard.

The project achieves the 2025 embodied carbon intensity target for the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, with an as-built result of 670 kgCO2/sqm.

The design and delivery of the new school is the result of very positive joint working between Hampshire County Council, Eastleigh Borough Council, the housing developer Highwood and a successful ‘one team’ culture with Property Services, Morgan Sindall Construction, Streif and the University of Winchester Academy Trust.