Monksmoor Park Primary School, Daventry

This new build Sunesis Keynes 1.5 FE new primary school and nursery was built on a ‘green field’ site as part of Crest Nicholson's Monksmoor estate development near Daventry.

It’s a single-storey school consisting of open plan corridors, a multi-use sports hall and teaching spaces.

Why was it built?

Like many local authorities across the county, Daventry District Council needed new schools to meet the growing demand for school places, which increased with a new 1,000 house development beginning in the area.

Project manager for the council, Rob Saunders, was responsible for delivering a new school and visited three other Sunesis projects. He was very impressed with the inspirational learning environments provided by the Keynes model and chose a 1.5FE Keynes school.

The new school provides 237 pupil places and an additional 30 nursery places. Working with the council's tight timescales, we handed over the school on May 8th - 38 weeks after construction had started.

Rob Saunders:

“Within the council, there is a recognition of a good job done on this scheme and the level of trust is such now that we will certainly be wanting to talk about future schemes.”

Making sure the community benefited

The project was procured through the Scape National Construction framework; Scape Group is a public-sector organisation, dedicated to creating ongoing efficiency and social value via the built environment.

As part of to this, the team on Monksmoor Park Primary School achieved a 10% return on social investment. This saw over £400,000 put into the community through activities such as work experience opportunities, apprenticeships and working with local colleges.

How did we achieve the 10%?

• Working with a local college – Moulton College – and delivering careers talks, health and safety talks, BIM workshops
• Providing Moulton College students with work experience on site
• Supporting local people with employment opportunities
• Giving opportunities to apprentices
• Hosting Open Doors on site and giving careers talks to visitor

The Rt Revd John Holbrook, Bishop of Brixworth said:

"We are so excited by the prospect of creating a brand new school community and look forward to working together to create a special place of learning which enriches the lives of everyone."

Why it achieved defect free?

Quality starts during design, the Sunesis model has been refined over a number of past projects, through sharing of learning and getting a consistent design this has developed into a more refined product.

We focused on what the customer wanted, we considered their feedback and what were sensitive quality issues from other schemes they had experience of, operations such as render/cladding and aggregates for sub base were hot topics and we paid them great attention with our SCP’s and evidenced this to the customer who was assured of our teams intention to deliver a high quality product, this resulted in trust and swift agreement of signing off defects through the soft landing process.

It was key to set the project up from the outset to succeed, when a customer, SCP manager, visitor or our SCP operatives arrive on site they should see a well organised project with good accommodation, facilities and good planning implementation, if the operatives can have consistency of work and be productive and safe then quality will follow.

On Monksmoor Park the team engaged with SCP’s at early package meetings and had dedicated time to review our Quality Make ready, QD checklist and Fieldview requirements and Protection strategy.

As a team we sat down and considered what we could produce as a quality charter and carried out TBT’s with a SCP operative’s surrounding this, we also shared current site information and technical support from the HUB using an on-site Quality delivery board as photographed. We took on board advice of our LCO Quality team and sought advise as required and acted diligently on the reports or our quality group inspectors so as to ensure the product was not compromised.

All in all good communication and quality controls were implemented practically and people bought into the ‘Right First Time’ mantra.