Video Transcription

Hi my name is Kevin Ainslie, I’m head of school here at Hampton Gardens in Peterborough. You join us in our fantastic dining room which is an amazing facility for our students to use. However we found as our school has grown and is now at nearly full capacity it’s made it really difficult to give the students the dining facility that we would like them to have.

Here at Hampton Gardens we are lucky that we do have a significant amount of outdoor space and we’ve explored this by putting in an outside pod. This has really helped to alleviate some of the congestion in the dining hall but unfortunately is not a year long solution.

We worked with a number of companies to look at different options but it was working in conjunction with A&S Landscape where we were able to come up with the concept of an outdoor covered dining facility and we think that’s going to make a massive difference.

We’ve been really keen to get this project started as soon as possible and working with A&S Landscape we’ve been able to complete this work during term time. As you can see behind me the area has been cordoned off and working together we’ve been able to make sure that the school can still continue to operate as normal whilst the building works completed.

You join us here now on site and as you can see building work has started. We’re really excited to see what the final product of the dining facility is going to look like.

So we’re here on site on Hampton Gardens, you can see now that the new dining hall is completely finished. We’ve been really pleased at the speed at which the project has been able to be completed. And it’s been great to see that the site has been put back in a really workable way. It’s something we’ve found with the whole project actually, it’s been able to take place during school time and particularly challenging with some of the weather conditions we’ve had over the last few months made life quite difficult. But really happy with the final product, as you can see it looks sensational behind us.

So we’re here inside the finished dining hall and we’re really pleased with the final structure. How it looks, the quality of the build. It’s a really windy day today and we’re stood inside and we can’t really feel any of those elements at all, the building feels really strong and purposeful and we’re really looking forward to getting our furniture in here and seeing the final experience for our students. It’s going to provide an excellent opportunity and facility for them to have their lunch and a nice space away from the elements and the final product is exactly what we want in keeping with the rest of our buildings.

I would absolutely recommend working with A&S again for any other headteacher thinking of trying to find a solution to a dining problem. The ability to actually work during school time has been one of the key differences which has really helped. So we’ve been able to make this project work, whilst not having to wait for either those different school holidays.

I think the communication has been a key element to making that success and definitely this has made a huge difference to our school and our students.