School's apartment gets designer makeover
The modern housebuilder, House by Urban Splash, has fully furnished the apartment for the special needs school, at the Martin Bacon Academy, Northstowe.
The housebuilder, which is currently creating a new community of precision-engineered homes next door to the school at Northstowe, has provided its interior design skills, expertise and furnishing using their own interior design experts, a network of contacts and through the Urban Splash Charitable Trust.
After creating a mood board including design ideas for the school to look at and choose from they have now fully fitted out the apartment ready for students to use from this new school term. Firms including AO.com and Loft-interiors.com have provided goods for the project.
The new apartment is a training flat that will benefit hundreds of young people with special needs who are training in independent living. Students will stay at the flat during the day or overnight for different periods of time as part of their studies before hopefully moving into their own independent living space.
The Martin Bacon Academy is part of the wider Northstowe Learning Community and Cambridge Meridian Academy Trust (CMAT). It is a brand new, state of the art, Area Special School, at the Northstowe Education Campus which also currently includes the Secondary College. This facility caters for children and young people aged 3 to 19 who have a range of complex and significant learning needs in the area of cognition and learning (with other co-occurring conditions).
Sarah Louise is Deputy Headteacher and has led the project for the school: “This fantastic modern equipped apartment replicates those in the town of Northstowe allowing for familiarity for our leavers should they be able to live independently within their community. It offers our young people the chance to build independent living skills up over a number of years so when they leave us and head to adult services they are already equipped to take their next steps in life.”
