Keywords

Introduction

Doveton College is a pioneering project in Australia for the provision of integrated education and community support. The college, now in its 10th year of operation, delivers education from birth through to Year 9, along with a range of other services including Maternal and Child Health, allied health, playgroups, community and adult education, community engagement activities and a range of other social and recreation programs. It is probably the most comprehensive and illustrative example of a school as a community hub that exists in Australia or possibly anywhere in the world.

The vision for Doveton College came about largely through the lobbying efforts of philanthropist Julius Colman and the Colman Foundation (Our Place, 2013). Colman had been inspired by a visit to Agassi Prep in Las Vegas, USA, a public charter school that was enhancing the educational outcomes of children in need with the support of the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education. In 2007, Colman approached then Victorian Premier John Brumby with a proposal to provide funding to a new school aimed at transforming the lives of underprivileged children in a socially deprived community in Victoria.

The timing of Colman’s approach was fortuitous for three main reasons. First, Victoria’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) had commenced the Building Futures initiative, a program that enabled government to work with schools and communities to plan for school infrastructure developments, in areas where changes in demographics meant that the existing school structure was no longer fit for purpose. Doveton was a good fit for the program and other regenerations were occurring in nearby suburbs.

Second, the Commonwealth government was working on a National Early Childhood Development Strategy, focussing on the provision of integrated early childhood education, connected with schools, to ensure all Australian children are fully prepared for learning and life.

Third, the subsequent announcement of the Commonwealth’s Building the Education Revolution (BER) program provided a catalyst for the project to proceed quickly and provided a multi-tiered capital funding stream for the project. The contract for the first stage of construction was also signed on the last day of the Brumby government.

This alignment of programs, policy and funding across tiers of Australian government enabled a holistic place-based, child-centred approach for Doveton College (Fig. 1). Although other regeneration projects had sought to raise educational standards in low performing and socially vulnerable areas, Doveton College was the first in Australia to specifically target a particular “at-risk” community, with the aim of drastically boosting educational standards and, hence, whole of life opportunities for children of the community through intervention, family support and community integration (Glover, 2020).

Fig. 1
A circular diagram of the vision for Doveton College includes individuals, school, family, and the wider community.

A holistic place-based, child-centred approach for Doveton College (Image by author)

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With early evaluations highlighting the positive impacts of the Doveton College approach, the Colman Foundation established Our Place to facilitate the partnerships necessary to scale the approach to other locations in Victoria (Our Place, 2013).

This chapter explores the project context, design strategies and lessons learned from the Doveton College project, from the perspective of the lead design consultant: Brand Architects.

The Service Delivery Model

The service delivery model for the school is unique, developed at a local level with a focus on the needs of the local community around Doveton.

The delivery model and educational programs were progressed largely in parallel with the physical design, during 2009 and 2010 by the Doveton Regeneration Project Board, a separate body established by DEECD and the Colman Foundation, to oversee development of the school. In 2010, the board also engaged the Centre for Community Child Health, one of Australia’s preeminent research institutes in childhood development, to assist in the development of a needs analysis and service model for the Early Learning Centre (ELC).

Initially, it was thought that all services could be run directly by the Doveton College Council. However, as planning proceeded and the funding streams to support school operation were explored, it became apparent that due to the split of federal and state funding for different types of programs, and the way in which this funding was distributed, the school council would be ineligible to receive funding for many of the programs that they wanted to run. This led the Regeneration Board to develop memorandums of understanding with a broad range of community organisations, to run programs from Doveton College under the guidance and supervision of the school council. To date at least 17 different MOU’s have been established with organisations across a broad range of services, focusing on both early childhood needs, as well as family and community services, justice and social security.

Once the initial service model was established, there was a need to further develop the educational model for the school. In early 2010 (again in parallel with the physical design) a pedagogy and programs working group was established to work with the project board. This working group consisted of representatives of the South Metropolitan Region (DEECD), staff from existing schools and consultants to shape an educational philosophy and framework, specific to the college’s needs.

The educational model applied at Doveton College “focuses on personalized learning and ensuring that every child’s education is structured and tailored to meet their (individual) learning needs and supports high levels of achievement” (Our Place, 2013, p. 30).

To support the educational model, the program was developed across a 3-level structure—the ELC which focuses on 0- to 5-year-olds, the Early Years Program for students from Prep to Year 3, and the Middle Years Program, for students from Year 4 through to Year 9. In physical terms, this led to the development of purpose-built “learning houses” and specialist facilities for ICT, digital media, visual arts, performing arts/technology, and fitness and recreation, to provide state-of-the-art facilities to support students to reach their true potential.

The governance structure for the school is also unique. Initially Colman wanted to deliver the programs through an independent school, but with the significant funding from both the state and federal governments and the need to close and merge other state schools in the area to allow the college to be feasible, a unique arrangement was developed.

Doveton College is governed by a school council that uniquely has representation from the Colman Foundation, the community and the Department of Education, written into its charter. The foundation holds a third of the seats on the school council, but the position of School Council President is still held by a separate community member, as with most other government schools. This arrangement ensures that the original vision of the school is maintained and that school’s funding streams for various services that are not provided by the (now) Department of Education, can be sourced through either philanthropic or other sources.

Our Place is the organization established by the Colman foundation to further the vision and mission of Doveton College and apply it to other sites in partnership with the Victorian State Government.

Project Planning Processes

Brand Architects were appointed under the BER project management as Principal Design Consultant to work with the college and the Colman Foundation, to bring the vision to physical reality. As with all BER projects, which were aimed at economic stimulus, the project had a tight timeline, with the aim of opening the first stage of the school by the end of 2011.

As with almost all Victorian State Government education projects, the project started with a standard brief regarding the facilities entitlement for a P-9 college, of the size anticipated. A process was established to examine the spatial requirements, with the intention of adding spaces to the brief that were required to provide the additional services anticipated.

Every additional square metre added to the brief had to be justified and approved by the department, based on either a direct need for service delivery, an additional space justified by the educational program, or space that was able to be funded outside the available brief.

To commence this process, Brand Architects developed the facilities schedule in detail, distributing available area within an overall site strategy. To commence the process of determining and testing additional areas, the architects then worked with the project board to initially brainstorm the types of activities that might be operated from the college. A draft schedule of areas over and above the standard entitlement was developed and perhaps not surprisingly, the total amount of area required exceeded the available funding.

Following this, a series of meetings was held with the City of Greater Dandenong (the local council), independent service providers and other organisations, including government departments and authorities. These meetings were aimed at determining the level of interest from the various service providers in operating from the college site, including what space might be required, what level of integration could occur and what operational issues might arise, including issues of privacy, information security and physical access.

While initially most service providers showed great interest in the project and its overall vision, there was some hesitancy in committing to taking space within the college, particularly where operators were providing services from other facilities nearby. Because of this, there was initially some guesswork applied to determining the spatial requirements, and although the college board was confident that all space would be taken up, there was initially some resistance from the education department to providing additional space that could not be immediately justified.

As an additional strand to the planning process, several community consultation sessions were held with parent groups from the local schools that were being merged to form the new college. There project board was attuned to a level of scepticism within the community to the new project, as other services had been closed within the Doveton area in the years immediately prior to the project. A significant amount of work was done by the Colman Foundation and the project board to bring interested members of the community on board early in the process and have them involved in the planning, to ensure that the government’s commitment to the project was well understood within the community. The information obtained from these community consultation sessions was valuable and informed several the architectural strategies outlined below.

The original site for the project, Doveton Heights Primary School, was deemed to be too small on its own to accommodate the anticipated number of students. To the north of the site is the Doveton Pool in the Park, which occupies the remainder of a larger open space block, within the suburb. As part of the project, the council agreed to sell approximately 0.7 hectares of the pool site to the education department, to enable the additional services and school enrolment to be accommodated.

The amount of space required still necessitated many of the buildings being two-storey and onsite parking to be limited. As the pool was only open during the summer months, an agreement was also made with council to allow the school to utilise the pool’s dedicated parking for use by staff and visitors to the school throughout the year.

Architectural Strategies

Four key architectural strategies informed the overall masterplan for the college, aligning with the overall vision as articulated by the Colman Foundation and the project board.

One Front Door

Perhaps the most important strategy for Doveton College was the ‘one front door’ policy. From previous research work done by the Colman Foundation and others, it had become apparent that a major inhibitor to the delivery of quality community services was the need for people to engage with multiple agencies and to repeat personal information many times. The Colman Foundation was determined to overcome this and to ensure that anyone seeking services of any type, from education through to family services, could access these via a single contact point, with the aim of only having to provide their information once. This had a major impact on the planning of the college, with the aim to put as many of the services near the front door as possible, with the aim of ‘catching’ people as they entered the building.

The main foyer became a critically important space in the design. It was from this space that most of the services were accessed, including childcare, school reception and many of the consultant spaces. Within this space, staff can connect with parents bringing their children to childcare and follow up any previous engagement with the college or engage with them about a known issue. Most of the service providers also had their offices in this area, to make them immediately accessible to the front desk as people came to reception.

This strategy has since been adopted by the other Our Place facilities around the state and continues to prove a successful strategy in a range of different contexts.

Zoning for Child Safety

One of the key outcomes of the community consultation was the community’s concern for the safety and security of their children attending the site, particularly on such a small site, and because were other (non-education) services to be provided. Parents were particularly concerned not just about engagement between their children and other members of the community, but also between younger children and older children attending the school, as the local secondary colleges did not have a particularly good reputation at the time.

For this reason, there was a conscious decision to age zone the site, to ensure that each of the sub-schools had an identifiable area of the site that they could occupy, without fear of engagement with other groups. This was achieved largely through placement of the buildings to form internal courtyards within the site and define these courtyards with several “gateway” spaces that contain shared facilities.

Integration with the Community

Another key strategy in the design was to ensure that the new buildings felt part of the community and not an isolated entity (see Fig. 2). Brand Architects made the conscious decision to minimise the use of fencing on the site and to bring the buildings to the street boundary wherever possible, to provide a more friendly and inclusive address to the school from the street. As most of the surrounding streetscape is single-storey residential properties, the two-storey forms of the school needed to be carefully considered and articulated so as not to dominate the streetscape. Initially there was some resistance from the department to the removal of boundary fencing, as it is department policy to fence all school sites at the boundary. However, feedback from the community indicates that this has been an important aspect in community acceptance of the college, particularly in the early days. Existing mature trees were surveyed and incorporated into the masterplan, with several large eucalyptus being retained and forming focal points within the overall design.

Fig. 2
An illustration of the detailed structure of a building where age group zone, fenced, shared zone, built public interface, and controlled access point are marked.

Site zoning and access (Image by author)

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Space Planning

As the more detailed planning of the individual buildings developed, several key strategies emerged to support the college’s vision. As noted earlier, the college’s educational model was established around three sub-schools—0 to Year 2, Year 3 to Year 6, and Year 7 to Year 9.

Demographics for the area predicted that enrolment would be stable across these year groups for some time, particularly with the ELC feeding into the school. This enabled more precise planning of the spaces within each of the sub-schools and allowed Brand Architects to more directly design the spaces for the various age groups and individual educational requirements, with a focus on early intervention in the junior sub-school. This necessitated the provision of additional break-out spaces within the flexible open-plan communities.

The spaces in these buildings included the provision of space for parents to interact and be involved in their children’s education. There was also a strong focus on the connection with outdoor learning spaces and playgrounds for the early years. The middle- and upper-years sub-schools, had a more direct focus on students’ personalised learning journeys. The focus was on different types of learning settings for individual collaborative and larger group activities. While this is commonplace in contemporary designs, at the time it was still new, and the environments were very different to the existing educational facilities that were in the area.

At the 7 to 9 level, particular attention was paid to the opportunities for students’ self-expression. This evolved out of work that the Colman Foundation had done and examples overseas including in the Andre Agassi Academy, where it was noted that student confidence and learning outcomes could be significantly improved by ensuring that students had the opportunities to develop self-expression. Visual and performing arts took on a particular importance within the overall planning of the college.

Once the general educational requirements for the spaces had been established, the possibilities for community use were overlayed on the planning and site arrangement. The project board and the Colman Foundation had a particular desire for the college to operate from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., with all the facilities being utilised as much as possible. As part of the design process, Brand Architects established a ‘temporal matrix’ to establish potential usage patterns for various facilities across the site, both before, during and after school hours (Fig. 3). Access arrangements were then explored to ensure that community access to the various shared facilities could be maintained while keeping the school secure. This involved placing many of the shared facilities to the edge of the site with access available from both internally within the school and externally from the street (Fig. 4).

Fig. 3
A schedule for the college's operations from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a variety of facilities.

The temporal matrix (Image by author)

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Fig. 4
An illustration of a building's detailed structure, with ELC, shared zone, community space, and controlled community access denoted.

Community accessible space (Image by author)

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Across the site the following key activity areas were planned to enable both school and community use:

Sports The school was provided with a full-size single court sports hall and an additional weights room and gymnasium. The sports hall is utilised for the full time the school is open, either by parent groups, the school, or local sports groups in the afternoons and evenings. The weights room is also utilised outside school hours for parent fitness programs.

Library The school’s library has been located on the south boundary of the site, with both internal and external access. The library houses the school’s resources, but has the capability to host parent literacy programs, as well as computer classes via the adjacent IT lab.

Visual Arts and Technology The school’s visual arts and technology spaces were combined to form a single creative arts precinct, with central design space and several surrounding studios. Opportunities are provided for small group planning and presentations as well as community use for parent classes, men’s shed activities and exhibitions.

Food The school’s food technology kitchen is also located to enable community access. It is co-located with the performing arts spaces to act as a support for community events and after-hours programs. The school’s food kitchen hosts cooking classes for parents, in addition to its educational use. The school also has several community gardens, both on and around the site and places a strong emphasis on food education and its benefits for overall community health.

Performing Arts Music, drama and multi-media are given a very strong emphasis in the educational programs at the school. As a P-9 college, the area entitlement for these activities is relatively minor and the architects argued strongly for additional space to support these programs. As part of the planning a small performing arts studio was developed with an internal 150-seat theatre space. The performing arts space also links with a music studio which has recording and instrumental music capabilities. Both facilities have external access from the street, as well as internal access from the agora space.

The Agora The agora forms a very important overall gathering space within the school community. It is located to connect to many of the community accessible facilities on the southern end of the site, linking the sports, performing arts and library spaces, as well as having direct access to the canteen. The spaces host whole of school assemblies, graduation ceremonies and community events. The stage to the performing arts centre opens to this space to allow large-scale performance and theatre “in the round”.

The Ceremonial Bridge At the western end of the agora space is a ceremonial bridge. This walkway links the performing arts centre with the 3–6 learning community on the upper level. The bridge is not available for access for most of the year, instead reserved for the crossing of graduating students. Modelled on Agassi Prep in Las Vegas, the intention is that crossing the bridge gives graduating students a sense of achievement and symbolises their continuing educational journey.

The Project House The project house is a small building that sits within the centre of the site. It houses a single large multi-purpose workshop space and a community kitchen. It was originally intended to house the primary art facilities, but over time has developed and now acts as an important space at the centre of the college. It is used for creative activities during school hours, but also houses breakfast club, community kitchen garden activities, along with several other social and community gatherings. It is well located next to the playing field and is on the edge of the building precinct and accessible from the street without having to go through the remainder of the school.

Lessons Learned

Doveton College has now been operating for ten years and over that time there have been several lessons learnt from the design and operation of the college, some of which have fed into other Our Place projects. There are also many lessons in the design of the college that are applicable to the development of schools as community hubs more generally. This chapter highlights five key lessons.

First, there is a need to align funding sources for programs and overall governance. As noted earlier, it was originally thought that the school would be able to run under one single governance structure, with all funding coming to that body. However, in Australia, funding streams for community services, early education and P-12 schooling are disjointed across Commonwealth, state, and local government levels. Furthermore, most funding has very specific requirements for who can receive it and how it can be used. This complexity precluded the school from making direct applications to run programs. Instead, the partnerships model of the college supported applications for funding of specific programs. As a result, the disjointed funding streams impacted space requirements within the main building and the early years’ spaces. For example, the brief for the early years’ spaces changed from sessional kindergarten to long day care halfway through construction due to revised funding and educational model.

Second, the transition from early years programs to prep is a critical part of children’s development. The school acknowledges that, in hindsight, the licensed early years facility could have benefitted from a stronger physical connection to the P-2 community. The college currently has a standalone prep learning house. However, this may have led to potential issues related to separating a licensed and non-licensed area within the building.

Third, there are advantages in offering continuity of education from early years to year 12. This approach had been the initial aspiration of the Coleman Foundation, with pathways to tertiary education, as per the Agassi Academy model. However, during the early strategic planning process, the department determined that the school should be a P-9 College to align with the overall Building Futures program and other regeneration projects at secondary level in the local area. This has caused difficulties for the college, as some families have been reluctant to send their children to Doveton College from Year 7–9, only to subsequently change to another local secondary college. This has led to a drop off in enrolments at Year 7 at the college, with a consequential mismatch with the use of space from the originally intended design. In future projects, this could possibly be overcome on a larger site or with a campus model. The aspiration to offer a continuous education program from birth to Year 12 holds potential benefits across a range of educational, social and community dimensions.

Fourth, allow time to embed innovative education models and programs across learning communities. The college was the result of a merger of several other underperforming schools that had been teaching in traditional 1950’s facilities. As such, students from prep onwards had not been exposed to personalised learning programs or flexible learning community space, leading to some adjustment and social cohesion issues early in the school’s life. Julius Colman’s original idea have been to start the school with ELC enrolment only, creating a cohort of students prepared for the new program and environment. However, for financial and logistical reasons, this was not possible from the education department’s perspective. Importantly, as students have passed through the Doveton model, these issues have settled and resolved.

Finally, a key lesson from the project is not to be too conservative when planning community hubs. The initial reluctance of service providers to come on board with the project fell away quickly once the college started operating and the demand for space has continued to grow. In hindsight, more space should have been provided in the community hub to support the range of programs. The demand on current space has resulted in the college purchasing residential properties around the site, through the Colman Foundation, to enable extension activities to occur.

In planning for community hubs, it is important to think about the potential for expansion and ensure that the chosen site and building design can facilitate future expansion, in a logical way to support the growth of programs.

Conclusion

Overall, Doveton College’s first 10 years have been a success for its holistic interlinking of education, community and design. Educational outcomes include a reduction in the number of local children identified as developmentally vulnerable, improved literacy and numeracy measured by school entry testing in children attending Doveton ELC, and improved literacy and numeracy measured in children in Year 3 (Glover, 2020). Community outcomes include stories of family members who have engaged with the school on a broad range of social and educational issues. The college continues to support a wide range of community-based activities, from adult education and vocational skills, through to family and social services. Design outcomes include feedback from the college on the continued relevance of the key design strategies, with at least ten other projects now delivered in Victoria (Our Place, n.d.) and lessons learned being applied in a range of different contexts. Doveton College continues to be a flagship facility and remains the only fully integrated education and community services facility of its type in Australia.