Algeco secures £27.6m Northampton school utilising Seismic modular building platform

The ongoing calls for additional school places is undoubtedly the driving force behind increased investment in new, replacement and upgrade of educational facilities. The pressing need for additional places is driving significant changes in the type of construction technique specified, with the government pushing for platform-based construction solution.

Partly in response to a need for high quality teaching spaces, Northampton School for Boys applied to the Department for Education (DfE) to open a co-educational Free School. At the time of the application to the DfE, extensive public consultation with the local community showed considerable local support for the proposal. The site for the proposed school was owned by Northamptonshire County Council and the new facility would help meet the need for school places that the Council had forecast.

Following the public consultation, the proposal was successful in gaining DfE funding and it was subsequently named Northampton School for Boys Multi-Academy Trust. The new school will create a 1200 place new secondary school, including sixth form provision for 11-18 year olds. It is a state funded single sex boys' school. Girls are admitted to the Sixth Form.

Algeco was appointed to construct the school on behalf of the Department for Education who are funding the school. When completed, the school will be operated by the Northampton School for Boys Charitable Trust. Fittingly for such a forward thinking school, the construction project will be delivered using the Seismic platform on our modular buildings.

We secured the project via the MMC1 Lot 1 modular framework (*DfE published contract value is £27.6m) and were appointed as Principal Design & Build Contractor, working with Watson Batty Architects. Our approach will provide a full turnkey solution. Work will being work on site in January 2023.

A combination of our offsite and modular building construction system was specified at the school. The modules will be manufactured using Seismic platform-based construction solution. This approach is 75% faster and achieves a 47% improvement in value compared to traditional construction techniques; it even offers a 33% improvement in speed when compared with standard modular construction.

A total of 210 Seismic modules will be supplied to create the main teaching areas. We will also be utilising a hybrid structure for the halls, which require large open plan internal spaces.

Delivering these important Seismic benefits is helped by the fact that we manufacture the modular buildings at our manufactured facility in East Yorkshire. Utilising DfMA (Design for Manufacturing Assembly) and Lean Manufacturing, combined with Seismic design innovation, allows us to deliver the modules with a high PMV (Pre Manufacturer Value) of around 80 percent. This reduces the amount of work required on site and means that we can achieve the strict schedule on this project. The building modules will be delivered to site in August 2023. Handover of the completed school is scheduled to take place in 2024.

Seismic delivers in other areas, too. It results in a significant reduction in both operational and embodied carbon of up to 70%. This is achieved through factors including design efficiency, materials selection and manufacturing effectiveness, leading to limited wastage.

Another reason why the decision making committee at Northampton School for Boys Multi-Academy Trust chose Algeco was because we have a long track record of delivering large publicly funded projects like this. That includes work on other complete school builds such as the recently completed Hatchland Primary School, another modular building project that was successfully delivered by our offsite team.

Northampton school is slightly different because it utilises the new Seismic platform, and so should generate quite a bit of interest across the industry . That’s because the technology has the potential to help the Department for Education and other publicly and privately funded organisations to improve both delivery and outcomes on their build programmes across the UK.

To find out more about Algeco offsite, visit: https://www.algeco.co.uk/permanent