Thomas Telford UTC

The AA-designed West Midlands Construction UTC (WMCUTC) in Wolverhampton was opened in 2015 with the aim of providing vocational learning paths to pupils aged 14 to 19 years old wishing to pursue a career in construction.

We were appointed in 2020 to expand provision at the site to enable the school to include a broader range of spaces that would support pupils aged 11 to 14 following the wider requirements of the National Curriculum. The appointment followed WMCUTC’s collaboration under the Thomas Telford Trust with the OFSTED Outstanding Thomas Telford School. The strengths of the two schools will come together to offer students a truly ground-breaking opportunity.

The current UTC building has a capacity of 600 pupils and the expansion will push this total up by 450 to 1050 pupils overall, with a consequent increase in staffing and support numbers. The introduction of a wider curriculum, whilst still retaining elements of the vocational UTC learning paths requires additional teaching and support spaces to enable the UTC to adapt to this new collaboration under the Thomas Telford Trust.

The initial site layout concept was to link the new build to the existing and whilst this created efficiencies for the building, the retaining requirements escalated for the landscaping making the scheme unaffordable. The developed site layout gave the school an efficient building layout and site layout, whilst creating pockets of external space for both social and sports with far less retaining structure requirements than the previous. It also gives the school a new prominence at street level. The design consists of two separate elements; the teaching block and sports block. The teaching block is a three-storey element matching the storey height of the previous extension to the school. The saw-tooth roofscape of the teaching block has been designed to break up the massing of the building whilst also picking up on the industrial nature of the site and surrounding area. It incorporates offices, storage, SEN/Learning Support, Library, and spaces for music, D&T, general teaching, ICT, Drama, and Art.

The positioning of the sports block on the site ties in with the historic geometries across the Springfield Brewery site. This block contains a large sports hall, fitness suite, changing facilities, offices and storage.

Throughout the design and consultation process with stakeholders, various architectural languages were tested. Several consultation meetings were held with the local planning and conservation departments to develop the form and building appearance.

The existing building is a mixture of red brick and blue/charcoal brick to the listed building and black masonry base with render top to the previous extension. It therefore seemed appropriate to utilise a brick base for the new-build teaching block and sports block elements, tying in with the base material of the previous extension; a charcoal brick. At the upper levels, the new-build elements are proposed to be clad in a standing seam metal cladding as a contrast to the solid brick base. To reflect upon the nearby School of Architecture and the Built Environment development the cladding colour will have variations and be of a red/brown tone.