IN Brief:
- GRAHAM will replace seven existing buildings with a two- and three-storey 10,000 sq m school.
- Six blocks date from the 1960s and some contain RAAC, with preparatory works already under way.
- Teaching, SEND, sports, swimming, community access, green roofs, and solar PV are included in the new campus.
GRAHAM is delivering the rebuild of Cranbourne Secondary School in Basingstoke, replacing seven existing buildings with a single 10,000 sq m education and sports facility under the Department for Education’s School Rebuilding Programme.
The contract has been reported at £50m. Six of the seven buildings being replaced date from the 1960s and some contain reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, adding a condition-led requirement to a project that will also consolidate teaching and sporting accommodation across the existing 6.8-hectare campus.
Preparatory activities began during the summer, with foundation works expected to follow later in the year. Because the new school is being built on the occupied Wessex Close site, programme planning has to protect education operations while construction moves through enabling, substructure, frame, envelope, fit-out, and commissioning.
The replacement building will rise to two and three storeys and bring specialist and general teaching space under one roof. Music, art, design and technology, ICT, humanities, maths and science accommodation are included alongside an activity studio, administration areas, and facilities designed for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.
A sports hall and swimming pool will sit at ground-floor level, with separate entrances allowing community users to access sporting facilities without moving through the main school. Primary schools are also expected to use the swimming pool during the school day.
That mixed occupation affects access control, safeguarding, circulation, fire strategy, changing facilities, servicing, and building operation. The sports areas cannot simply function as internal school rooms if they are expected to remain usable by separate groups outside the normal timetable.
The pool also carries a more intensive mechanical and electrical requirement than conventional classrooms. Water treatment, ventilation, humidity control, drainage, heating, plant access, and corrosion resistance have to be coordinated with the structure and envelope while controlling long-term energy consumption.
Science, technology, and ICT spaces add their own servicing demands. Power, data, ventilation, specialist furniture, drainage, and equipment interfaces need to be resolved before fit-out, reducing the room for late changes once partitions and ceilings begin to close.
External works include new sports pitches, reconfigured staff parking, and a cycle shelter. Green roofs and solar PV canopies form part of the environmental design, increasing the number of interfaces between roofing, drainage, waterproofing, electrical systems, access, maintenance, and structural loading.
The RAAC element makes careful sequencing particularly important. Existing buildings containing the material have to remain managed until replacement accommodation allows them to be taken out of use, while surveys and demolition plans need to reflect the condition of structures that are already known to require replacement.
Consolidating seven buildings into one principal facility should eventually reduce some of the duplicated roofs, plant, distribution routes, and maintenance liabilities associated with an older dispersed estate. Before those operational benefits can be realised, however, the construction programme has to bridge between the existing campus and the new one without interrupting teaching.
Live-school construction leaves little room for careless logistics. Deliveries, cranes, hoarding, temporary roads, workforce access, noise, dust, and emergency routes have to be separated from pupil movement, with particular constraints around arrival, departure, examinations, and periods when large numbers of students move between lessons.
Those restrictions make programme efficiency more complicated than simply increasing labour. Some activities can be accelerated through prefabrication or off-site preparation, but other work must fit around school operations and the physical limits of the site regardless of how many resources are available.
GRAHAM is delivering Cranbourne in partnership with Hampshire County Council and the Department for Education. The project is its third appointment under the DfE Construction Framework 2021, following The Castle Rock School in Leicestershire and Oasis Academy Temple Quarter in Bristol.
Framework experience can provide familiarity with Department for Education requirements, reporting, and standard technical expectations, although the site itself remains project-specific. Ground conditions, existing utilities, school operations, neighbouring residential streets, RAAC management, and the swimming pool all give Cranbourne a delivery profile that cannot be copied directly from another education scheme.
The Department’s rebuilding programme now contains hundreds of schools prioritised substantially by estate condition. That gives contractors a relatively visible public-sector workload, but each school still has to progress through design, affordability, procurement, and live-site delivery at a time when construction prices and specialist capacity remain significant programme variables.
For Cranbourne, the immediate test is foundations rather than national policy. Preparatory works are already under way, and the project is moving towards the point where the replacement school begins to take physical form alongside the buildings it is intended to supersede.
The completion challenge will eventually reverse that relationship. Teaching, sports, ICT, building controls, life-safety systems, and specialist areas have to be fully commissioned before pupils can move across, after which the old buildings can be removed or retired without leaving the school dependent on temporary accommodation.
The £50m rebuild is therefore less a straightforward new school than a staged transfer from an ageing, partly RAAC-affected estate into one integrated campus. GRAHAM’s task is to make that transition while the existing school remains operational — the kind of constraint rarely captured by the clean CGI issued when a project is announced.
