The new Prospects College achieves a BREEAM ‘Very Good’ Certificate

Prospects College is a vocational skills training provider based in the South East of England with sites in Southend, Brentwood and Basildon, providing courses for students aged from 14 years upwards.

Architects Ayshford Sansome have been working with Prospects since 2006 and this is the sixth training facility the practice has worked on for the college. The original aspiration for the Centre was to create a sustainable building featuring sustainable technologies, both in its construction and its detailing.

Prospects College also intended to use the building itself and its various services as a practical education resource within which building services students could actively hone their construction skills. To this end it was envisaged that many of the buildings’ services would be exposed and the data provided by monitoring their performance and energy consumption would be displayed within the building and become an integral part of the education process.

Shortly after work started on the new college, changes to the way the funding was provided meant a reduction of one third in the budget for the building. Ayshford Sansome  Associate Rob Westbrook: “Obviously, with a significantly reduced budget, we had to look again at everything that was planned for the Centre. Natural ventilation was a key consideration for the sustainability of the building and when the original specification was reviewed Monodraught emerged as the preferred candidate, meeting our brief in terms of cost, sustainability and the potential as an educational source.”

The final design included X-AIR WINDCATCHER®,
SOLA-BOOST variants and the low-energy cooling and ventilation system COOL-PHASE® primarily for the ICT suites due to the expected heat gains. Each of the WINDCATCHERs,
SOLA-BOOST and COOL-PHASE units were linked to an iNVent controller.

Data from all the Monodraught systems are recorded every
half-hour and can be downloaded to enable the latest energy use figures to be used within teaching sessions.  This approach is helping to achieve

another Prospects ambition: to provide students with practical on-going educational information.

Key benefits

• BREEAM ‘Very Good’ Certificate achieved
• Budget reductions made a strong case for ventilation & cooling solution
• Installed working systems provide useful training tools
• Low energy, low carbon ventilation & cooling
• No cooling refrigerants
• Low maintenance

Photos are used with the kind permission of Mr Andrew Hatfield.