Appleyards was employed by the University of Reading (UoR) to work in partnership with their Facilities Management Department and architects, Stride Treglown, to carry out a feasibility study on the Institute of Education (IoE) and School of Continuing Education (SoCE) which operate on their Bulmershe Court campus. The object of the study was to determine whether UoR would be able to successfully transfer teaching operations from Bulmershe to their London Road campus, following renovation of the buildings, with as few changes as possible to the existing timetables and with minimal renovation works.

Preliminary work had already been carried out by Stride Treglown, who had developed a schedule of proposed spaces at London Road. Using attendance and scheduling data for Autumn Term 2006 (agreed as a worst case scenario for space usage) Appleyards was able to carry out a comparative analysis between three space management proposals – the original from Stride Treglown, one with further subdivision to increase the number of small spaces, and one which used the larger spaces for overflow capacity. Our analysis showed massive inefficiencies in their use of space and concluded that the use of timetable management would be the best approach to reduce costs and improve feasibility. Our conclusions convinced UoR that they would need to compromise on one of their main project constraints, the need to retain existing timetables, in order to achieve their stated aim.

Having been impressed with our first analysis, UoR invited Appleyards back to conduct a second analysis on the use of specialist spaces at Bulmershe – specifically with respect to Art, Music, ICT, Science, Drama, PE & Modern Foreign Languages. Similar data were used to those in the first analysis but were employed in such a way that graphically demonstrated the effect of reducing the available specialist spaces in an effort to bring the efficiency of their usage as close to 100% as possible. Additionally, the Bulmershe space usage and actual space requirements were compared to space usage guidelines for Higher Education; the analysis again showed the space available was far in excess of the specialist subject departments’ requirements. Appleyards suggested two alternative approaches to reduce inefficiencies – one was to remove various amounts of space for each specialist subject once they had moved to London Road (saving about 27% in total), the other was to re-brief the entire scheme accounting for the fact that space can be used much more efficiently.

Though our favoured recommendation was to re-brief the entire scheme our assumption was that UoR would favour the smaller scale changes for individual subjects, but the strength of evidence presented in our report caused UoR to reconsider its position. UoR management have now resolved to work towards a more suitable compromise between themselves and their staff balancing the costs and benefits to all stakeholders.
We have since met with the project managers working on behalf of UoR, Provelio, who are planning to commission us for an additional piece of work to do a feasibility study on their re-briefed building scheme.