St. John & St. Paul’s N.S., Drogheda
- Client:The Board of Management Holy Family Presbytery
- Designer:Coady Architects
- Status: Completed
St. John & St. Paul’s N.S., Drogheda
St John’s National School (NS) was first formed in 1974 and moved to its present location on Marley’s Lane in 1979. By 1982 the school population had grown so much that the cycles had to be split, and St Paul's Senior NS was formed on the same site. In the years that followed, the prospect of a new school building had been actively pursued but many factors including land availability delayed the process. The successful lease of adjacent land kick started the project and a highly complex 5 phase plan was then initiated which facilitated the complete demolition of the old school and the provision of modern facilities.
The new St John & St. Paul’s National School, Drogheda opened in September 2016. The state of the art new building served to fully replace the existing St John's Junior NS and St Paul's Senior NS buildings which were carefully demolished over a phased 3-year delivery period. In addition to 44 fully equipped classrooms, the new 7,570m² school boasts four general purpose rooms, 2 large sports halls subdivided with folding partition doors and a fully equipped meal’s kitchen with separate dining hall with associated facilities. The building is internally separated to provide 2 separate school facilities, with access control into the shared Dining facility.
KEY FEATURES
Programme and quality were achieved throughout the project and influenced by the following factors:
- Early, proactive engagement with An Post was critical to securing the lease of land to create a new 1,500m² grass play area prior to Phase 1 of the project
- Significant enabling works including temporary layout of Marley’s Lane to NRA standards to effectively segregate school and site traffic
- Site security was important owing to high levels of vandalism. We installed comprehensive CCTV connected to 24hr Netwatch allowing Gardai & Site Staff to respond rapidly where risk to site works was observed
- Fortnightly meetings on site, with 2 week look ahead reports ensured that school staff were fully aware of all programmed work and could determine impact on daily activities. Where necessary we rescheduled works at key times
- Value Engineering exercises negated overspend or impact to programme. We commissioned additional surveys to demonstrate piled design could be replaced with trench fill providing significant cost and time savings