Morgan Sindall breaks ground at £20m Sharlston Community School

Morgan Sindall’s Yorkshire team has held a groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of work on a new primary school in Sharlston Common, West Yorkshire. The 315-pupil school and 39-place nursery is being built on behalf of the Department for Education (DfE).

A new, single-storey building will replace the current school. It will host children from nursery age through to Year Six, and will include classrooms, a sports hall, an assembly room, and a kitchen.

Work will be delivered in two phases. The first phase focuses on constructing the new school building. The second phase involves demolishing the existing facilities, with the cleared space used for a new playground, a Multi-Use Games Area (MUGA), and a staff car park.

Morgan Sindall remains committed to sustainability as a key part of the project. The new school has been designed to meet BREEAM (Building Research Establishments Environmental Assessment Method) and is targeting an Excellent rating (representing performance equivalent to the top 10% of UK new non-domestic buildings).

The certification scheme requires the project to consider nine core sustainability categories, such as Management, Health & Wellbeing, Water, Waste, Energy, Materials, Transport, Pollution and Land use & Ecology). Each category contains numerous issues that can be targeted, a strategy has been set on Sharlston Community School which captures issues under each of these categories in order to maximise sustainable performance.

Additionally, the new school site has been designed to achieve a Biodiversity Net Gain that exceeds the regulatory 10% (a >14% gain in habitat units and a >17% gain hedgerow units) and an Urban Greening Factor of 0.43 (above the 0.35 required). This approach protects and mitigates against construction impacts, creates a focus for quality outdoor space for pupil wellbeing, considers future management and will enhance local biodiversity through the implementation of wildflower meadows, a green roof and additional tree and hedgerow planting.

The building will undergo Whole Life Carbon Assessment via CarboniCa, enabling the DfE and our teams to understand building carbon at each project stage, identify opportunities for reduction and understand the carbon impact of the completed school. To drive down energy usage and carbon during the operational life of the school, the building considers energy efficiency measures and will incorporate ground source heat pumps and a Biosolar roof to generate onsite renewable energy.