One side of Heron Road, south London, is lined with grey-brick, bay-windowed Victorian terraced houses. The other is dominated by a strikingly modern building. Michael Tippett School stands within a frame of timber pillars spanned by orange and maroon louvres, its walls are covered with slats of chestnut cladding and its eco-roof is topped with a thin carpet of mauve plants. Many schools for children with severe and complex special needs are designed to protect the children from the outside world and seem to hide them away. But through the front doors of Michael Tippett you can see the social hub of the school, a double-storey atrium, the garden and the undulating landscape of a small community park beyond. Situated in a part of Lambeth borough that is dominated by vast regimented blocks of flats and crammed terraces, this generous entrance is a bold statement about the value put on educating the least able in the community. 'It has to do with dignity and respect for the people we work with,' said head Jan Stogdon. 'The building reflects the ethos of the school.' Michael Tippett is named after the British composer whose music celebrated the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppression. The 70 pupils, aged 11 to 19, have their own daily struggles against the limitations of their own complex needs and severe or profound learning difficulties. Some have sight or hearing impairments, a number have gastrotomy tubes and others are at various points on the autistic spectrum. In the British education system, only a tiny percentage of the school population attends such schools, since pupils with less severe special needs attend mixed or mainstream schools. Typically, many special needs schools are housed in old buildings scarcely adaptable to new techniques and new technology available to educate children with complex problems. But inside Michael Tippett is an airy trove of urban space, tall classrooms with acoustic panelling, interactive plasma whiteboards and ubiquitous hoisting systems, all flooded with natural light. The specialist technology includes a cookery kitchen in which hobs and work surfaces can be raised or lowered electronically; a hydrotherapy pool with glitter balls and music system; an arts studio with mobile stage, animation suite, cameras and editing equipment, and a state-of-the-art sensory room with bubble tower, wind machine, colour lighting, projectors and huge screen. For Michael Tippett, previously based on two sites at either ends of this inner-city borough with a history of drug crimes, violence and social unrest, the government's launching of its Building Schools for the Future programme offered an opportunity to rethink how to address the priorities of the school and create an entirely new environment best suited to the needs of some of the borough's most disadvantaged pupils. The BSF programme is a GBP55 billion (HK$686 billion) effort to rebuild or refurbish all 3,500 secondary schools in England by 2020, but Michael Tippett was the first school in London and the first specialist school in the country to be completed. The school enlisted the services of Julia Barfield, of Marks Barfield Architects, the celebrated designer of the London Eye, the capital's iconic and stylish Ferris wheel which is visited by millions of tourists each year. Thus began a journey in which architects and teachers visited numerous examples of special needs schools and examined 21 option studies before agreeing the design, which won last year's top national prize in the BSF Awards and was named as the 'most transformational, inspirational and successful' BSF project. 'What is interesting about their vision is that it is very much about preparing the pupils for the outside world and not protecting them from it, in recognition that one day they will have to cope as best as possible when they leave school,' said Ms Barfield. 'That was the underlying philosophy.' According to Ms Stogdon, the priority was to open up the school in way that gave pupils a sense of their place in the community and the community a sense of their involvement in the school. But, above all, it had to be flexible and adaptable to future needs. 'Our students are not very visible in the community in that they come and go by school bus, and we think it is very important that people are able to see who we are. We spend a lot of time inviting residents in,' she said. The design makes this a 'see-through' school in the sense that, wherever you are inside, you can see the environment outside. 'The colour, natural light, views through windows and garden space give children an interesting change of view which is important if many of them have to spend a lot of time lying on the floor,' said Liz Fraser, of ICE architects, which was involved in the GBP8 million rebuild. Internal portholes and windows enable staff to encourage pupil independence by providing extensive opportunities for passive supervision. For example, the hall, where able-bodied and wheelchair-bound children were racing each other when I visited, can be looked into from both floors. Again, children are encouraged to find their way around the building by colour-coded doors - yellow for classrooms, red for staff only, blue for toilets - in place of written signs that would be unsuitable for the majority, whose skills are preverbal. A key aspect of the new building is the pervasive use of technology, none more so than in the sensory room where children do a lot of drama. 'We couldn't create this kind of sound and sensory equipment before,' said Almarie Mostert, subject leader for ICT. 'The studio creates a space where we can make the curriculum accessible for students with really complex needs and limited movement or abilities.' For instance, she will take what they are learning in science or a cross-curriculum topic and create a virtual environment for them to explore light, sounds and textures. 'We can go to the forest or to the sea,' Ms Mostert said. 'We can have the sounds of the beach and the waves, turn on the wind machine and use a sand pit. If we want to go under water using our LED lights, we can flood the room with blue colour.' One of the most popular tools is a fibre optic unit that plugs into a light unit. 'The fibres are two metres long and it creates a fire or river or something more sensory for our pupils to play with. And because the room is blacked out and there are so many fibres, they love picking it up in the dark.' This provides great opportunities to work with children with visual impairments. Images are projected on to a curtain that can be moved and placed on the pupils' laps, bringing the image to them or spun on a brolly held right in front of them. For the teachers, evoking the slightest response can be extremely rewarding if the pupil is severely impaired. 'We had one student last year who didn't respond to a lot of stimulation. But we used an evening scene, a blue wheel and picture of the sun, and every time it came round on the umbrella he shook his hand and giggled,' Ms Mostert said. 'It was very moving.' In many ways, Michael Tippett resembles one of the OECD's scenarios of future schools, in which schools become community hubs, bringing in other professions to provide other services that complement the work of teachers. Numerous health specialists attend to the needs of individual pupils, RM manages the computer network - there's also Wi-fi throughout the school - specialist agencies help develop the sensory technology and a drama company, Oily Cart, comes in to create new environments. 'This year in the hall they set up installations everywhere, materials and balls hanging, and students were put in swings and hoisted up a little,' Ms Mostert said. 'Students were dancing with balls and experiencing a different kind of movement. It is something we would not have been able to create anywhere else.' Last year Oily Cart transformed the hydrotherapy pool using mirror balls and a smoke machine to create a dramatic scene. 'This school is at the forefront of this kind of learning for these kinds of students,' Ms Mostert said. The opportunities for physical activity are particularly important, Ms Stogdon said, because the pupils mainly live in flats and do not get the chance to go out and play in the park. Even this limitation has been addressed in the design. The triangular site is squeezed between a small community park and terraced housing. A sports court had already been built in the park and the architects negotiated with the local community to encompass this in the design. So a school gate opens straight on to the park and pupils can use the court at agreed times. This freed up space in the school's site for a garden and patio area that is used for learning and play. Its hall has become a meeting place for local heads and governors. Students study a core curriculum of maths, English, information and communication technology, personal social health education and citizenship. But each student also has an individual education plan designed to provide for specific needs, including pastoral and personal care and life skills. Ms Stogdon stresses that teaching there is very labour-intensive, with typically three to six teachers working with a class of eight and their aim is to relentlessly push children's learning, no matter how severe the limitations. It is about continually taking very small steps. 'It is unlikely that we will have anyone going on to employment from here,' she said. 'But this is a school, not a prison, hospital or care home. We expect people to make progress.' Brendan O'Malley is former international editor of The Times Educational Supplement and works as a freelance consultant for Unesco. brendanomalley.journalist@googlemail.com
