The new Ashburton College will be built to match the specific needs of its own community rather than being built to a generic secondary school model, said principal Ross Preece.

Three weeks ago Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a $50 million rebuild of the 50-year-old college and this week, the details of that rebuild have been spelled out. And it’s all good news, Preece said.

“The master plan is being composed and, while we don’t know what’s in it, we know we’ll have the opportunity to have significant input.

“The ministry will now consult us about what’s required for our school, it will be about what’s best for us.”

Because the college had vacant land the build could start without disrupting current classrooms. These would gradually be demolished as new blocks were commissioned and in terms of design the new school will only be one storey because the college has a large landholding.

If there was any downside as the college project team moved into the early planning stages, it was that the ministry put the project’s completion date as the start of the 2025 school year, Preece said.

“That’s a bit of a downer but it’ll be worth the wait. For any school principal the only thing better than this would be opening a brand new school.”

The rest of this year would be taken up with planning the project. This will be followed by site master plan work before up to 18 months of design work commenced. Construction is likely to start in 2022 and take up to three years.

The new school would be built to accommodate a roll of up to 1600 students.

While support space infrastructure would be built for that number of students, classroom space would initially be for 1300 with the ability to add more classrooms as needed.

The college’s rebuild project team already has a clear idea of the teaching spaces the new school should have – specialist teaching rooms such as science labs and technology workshops, single cell classrooms and flexible spaces with breakout rooms, where three classes can come together.

“We’re now at a stage where we’ll invite staff to visit other schools and we’ll talk to colleagues about what has and hasn’t worked in other schools. We want to make sure we get our design right,” Preece said.

He is also keen to see corridors minimised and for as many classrooms as possible to have an indoor-outdoor flow.

“We’re pretty excited about this. It’ll provide a state-of-the-art college for Mid Canterbury.”

The college will be the largest remodel of any Ministry of Education project in the South Island, he said.

By Sue Newman © The Ashburton Guardian - 4 April 2019