ABSTRACT
The Woodlands Secondary School in Coventry was designed by the development group of the Ministry of Education in consultation with the local authority. The implications of the new economy measures introduced in 1949 were explained in a Building Bulletin on New secondary schools issued by the Ministry of Education in the following year. Probably the most influential method of adapting existing school buildings to a comprehensive system of education was that carried out in Leicestershire between 1957 and 1969. The Newsom Report urged the need to raise the school leaving age to sixteen, and included an interesting chapter on the design of school buildings for fifth-form pupils. The Pimlico design was certainly at variance with the open-plan approach which was increasingly coming into the secondary schools. The logical extension of the ‘purely educational’ school building is the ‘envelope’, which provides the maximum possible freedom of internal arrangement.
