New Design Guidance for School Sports Facilities
Monday 12 July 2004
sportscotland, Scotland’s national sports development agency, has recently published new design guidance : ‘Primary School Sports Facilities’. This document, a companion to last year’s ‘Secondary School Sports Facilities: Designing for School and Community Use’ is the latest in a series of technical digests which aims to help local authorities provide quality school sports facilities suitable for both school and wider community use. It has been produced with the help of many practitioners and experts in the field of physical education and school sport, and in consultation with all the key agencies in this field.
sportscotland is committed to ensuring the continued relevance and usefulness of this suite of guidance with the publication of guidance on school playing fields planned for later this year.
Education authorities will find both documents invaluable as they seek to meet the challenge of providing a minimum of two hours of physical education per week for every child, as announced by Education Miinister Peter Peacock on 14 June. Such an increase in the amount of PE received by children will in many schools have implications for the level of sports facilities required. The expansion of the Active Schools Programme also means there are increasing demands on facilities. The documents provide useful advice on meeting such requirements.
The design guides also complement and support the Scottish Executive's School Estate Strategy published in February 2003 and the commitment in ‘A Partnership for a Better Scotland’ (May 2003) that schools should be available to the whole community and include high quality facilities, including sports facilities. Local Education Authorities should also refer to them as they produce their own School Esate Strategies and in planning for the future of their school estate.
The new primary school guidance gives advice on how to calculate the physical education facility requirements for a range of school sizes, and gives detailed design guidance on the teaching and ancillary spaces required. The document also gives advice on how to ensure school facilities can be used by the wider community – essential if best value is to be obtained.
sportscotland is committed to ensuring the continued relevance and usefulness of this suite of guidance with the publication of guidance on school playing fields planned for later this year.
Alastair Dempster, Chairman of sportscotland, said: “This guidance illustrates the potential contribution our schools can make to the provision of community sports facilities throughout the country. This document will provide an essential reference for all local authorities on how to design facilities which meet both needs of the schools in delivering physical education and the need for sports facilities for local communities.”
To obtain a copy of the guidance documents, send a cheque (£5 for the primary school guidance only or £30 for both) made out to ‘sportscotland’ to Shauna Marsh, sportscotland, Caledonia House, South Gyle, Edinburgh, EH12 9DQ. Alternatively, both documents are available to download free of charge from www.sportscotland.org.uk.