Valley Park School, Maidstone

Working for Valley Invicta Academies Trust, Bauvill Education were appointed to deliver the conversion of an existing gymnasium and changing rooms into a new catering facility and dining hall to serve over 750 pupils per day. Working in tandem with the client, we undertook this project in a sequence to suit the school’s preferred priorities. Each section of the project was undertaken within a live school environment, and so keeping the works segregated from the pupils to ensure their safety was the main focus. Deliveries and noisy works were scheduled in partnership with the client to avoid main school run, break and lunch times, and to avoid noisy works during examination times.

Late changes from the client to adapt the design of the façade to one of the buildings was swiftly administered to achieve the required handover dates. The main problem on this project materialised pre-contract, with the window manufacturers increasing their lead in times from 8 weeks to 28 weeks. This was worked around by temporary waterproofing measures over the window openings to ensure the internal works could progress, leaving just the window reveals to complete once the windows were installed.

The new commercial catering kitchen to suit the entire school was of significance in terms of gas supplies, appliances, stainless steel surfaces and whiterock anti-bacterial cladding. The façade was changed from the existing brickwork to be painted, to a new Ecoscape vertical plank cladding and coloured render to give the building a new lease of life for generations to come.