Haileybury Brighton Junior School & Girls Middle School

The new building provides a canteen, multi-purpose room and general purpose classrooms that separate Junior School and the Girls Middle School facilities over two levels and connecting with an existing building at the first floor.

The new building embeds the school colours into the building fabric itself. Magenta has featured for the life of the school (122 years). Glazed bricks of the school’s magenta colour were sourced and integrated into the brick facades. Magenta also features on the glass spandrel panels and first floor balcony slot cut-out overlooking the courtyard. The magenta highlights reinforce the school identity and also feature in carpet banding, custom-made rugs and on student lockers.

The building provides a meeting space for families, promoting a sense of community – among parents, staff and children – that is most important to Haileybury. The multi-purpose room is a gathering place for parents, for Saturday sport and after-school drop off.

This building responds to the Haileybury Community’s wish to deliver a world class education facility, enhanced by contemporary learning environments. Haileybury has pioneered the highly successful explicit teaching model and the universal usage of iPads in classrooms in Victoria. Haileybury develops the core literacy and numeracy skills through the use of explicit, direct instructional learning in the Junior School. In the Girls Middle School, a combination of explicit instruction and student-centred learning is used. The school runs a system of parallel education from years 5 to 12, with students attending separate buildings within the same campus.

The new building supports effective teaching in dynamic spaces. Spaces are sympathetic to individual, small and large group learning, functions and catering. Performance glazing protects classrooms from harsh summer sun while large vertical metal fins (on the northern face) deflect summer sun, but allow winter rays. Wide covered walkways run outside the classrooms, with the upper level enclosed walkway bathed in natural light from large skylights.

The narrowness of the site and building envelope has created a positive outcome in the new building’s geometry: mediating the frontage of both the sports oval and tree lined access road and defining external play areas for students.