Bradford College Property Strategy

Bradford College is one of the largest providers in the sector – across 11 sites and with 80,000m2 of space. The College wanted to challenge traditional pedagogy, by creating spaces that would foster innovative teaching and learning styles, would meet the expectations of the learners and improve outcomes.

We led the Senior Management Team through a series of workshops to understand their educational vision. With a focus on the use of student-led, project-based work, peer-to-peer working and greater use of on-line resources,  a much greater emphasis was to be placed on the use of large, open informal/social learning environments.

We developed a bespoke space model that considered the whole of the estate as potential learning space – rather than by only using formal classrooms. The result was an improved spatial efficiency of 15-20% over more traditional space models which will reduce the estate to around 60,000m2 – thus both releasing disposal receipts and also providing significant running-cost savings.  We delivered the first phases of the strategy: the 24,000m2 David Hockney Building in 2014 and the 4,000m2 Advanced Technology Centre in 2015.