Woodmill & St Columba's RC High School

The all new state-of-the-art £122m secondary school facility was purpose built by BAM Construction for Fife Council, to home both St Columba’s RC High School and Woodmill High School. Both schools operate separately with some central shared facilities. As part of the larger £220m Dunfermline Learning Campus development there is a third place of education, Fife College, which is currently under construction just next door. AHR Architects in Glasgow were appointed to create the design of the 26,666m2 building to Passivhaus standards, making it the largest Passivhaus education building in the UK, and also believed to be the largest in Europe. This project elevated the standards of Scottish construction and so Procladd were delighted to be responsible for delivering the £4.7m roofing and cladding package. We installed 10,200m2 of Bituminous Hot Applied Liquid Waterproofing using a Bauder system for the roofs and were also responsible for 3000m2 Euroclad Vieo profile system for some elevations on the walls.

Supporting a forward-thinking, environmentally conscious design approach to achieve Passivhaus certification, the building had to meet rigorous energy efficiency standards and be so well constructed, insulated and ventilated that it can maintain an almost constant temperature all year round, requiring very little additional heating or cooling. The biggest challenge our designers faced was detailing the movement joints to allow the building to expand and contract over time. Individual junctions were developed carefully to achieve the designated U-Value and avoid ‘cold bridging’ by considering, and catering for vertical, horizontal and lateral movement throughout the build. A suitable airtight membrane had to be used to allow the necessary flexure during movement, some having curved or, two- and three-way joins. This technique had to be applied to the numerous roofs spanning over 10,200m2, which all had to be developed individually as no two roofs, or movement considerations, were the same. Given the stringent criteria the building had to meet, we also had regular roof inspections with the architect, main contractor, manufacturer and WARM (the Passivhaus Accreditors) during and after each phase of insulation and build up were completed. The manufacturer had to ensure each load of insulation coming to us was precision laser cut, and our installers were working to zero tolerance in gaps to ensure the highest possible quality and air tightness was achieved.

Due to the vast scale of the building, the roof was divided up into six phases along with a separate phase for the sports block. Procladd had four full time contract managers dedicated to the project, each delegated a separate area to oversee. The team carefully collaborated and planned the phasing of deliveries and scheduling materials to work in line with the main contractor’s programme. We colour co-ordinated the roofs to the corresponding phases for the team to easily identify and refer to the area they were working on. We had weekly meetings with our supply chain to manage expectation, place bulk orders and prepare them for the volume of materials required to guarantee availability to stagger and drip feed the project as and when required. Our contract managers had to create lifting plans to crane the huge volume of materials safely onto the roof. Throughout the project Procladd had a whopping number of 90 crane lifts planned to use various types of cranes from 40tonnes to 70tonnes and 4, 5 and 6 axle mobile self-erected tower cranes.