Ruislip High School

Ruislip High School was a new-build 5FE school on a green field site in Ruislip London Borough of Hillingdon. The aspiration was for this to be a community school accommodating 900 students, including 150 sixth-form students, excelling in technology and business.

The site was ecologically very sensitive and formed part of a Green Chain along the Yeading brook, the design responded to this location by retaining as much of the open character of the site as possible with a compact footprint, 2 and 3-storey teaching ‘barns’ reached out as green fingers from a central three-storey entrance and hub, each with green sedum roofs reintroducing biodiversity and controlling the rate of water runoff in this location which borders a flood plain.

The timescale from funding, design instruction to school opening was a mere 3 years, this included a record planning submission and approval within 3 months of instruction. It was one of the first schools to be naturally vented which meant facing the challenges of not only adequate thermal control but also the challenges of acoustic separation. Ruislip High school very proudly was one of the first schools to achieve a ‘Very Good’ rating in its final BREEAM assessment.