Greenhill Celebrates Outstanding Green Status
Greenhill Primary School in Gelligaer is well known in the community for its eye catching wind turbines and hi-tech solar panels, but now the school has been formally recognised for its outstanding ‘green’ credentials.
The school has officially achieved ‘BREEAM Outstanding’ status for its design and construction and is one of only two primary schools in Wales to achieve this prestigious accolade to date.
BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) is a world renowned method of assessing, rating and certifying the sustainability of buildings.
Greenhill Primary School was officially opened in 2012 and replaced an old 1960s-era school building with new, state of the art facilities. The building was designed to be highly energy efficient and incorporates a number of green features to ensure its sustainability including an array of solar photovoltaic panels on the roof and four wind turbines to generate electricity.
Cllr David Hardacre, CCBC Cabinet Member for Performance and Asset Management said, “This is fantastic news for the school and for the local authority as we are always striving to improve the green credentials of our buildings. Greenhill Primary School is a flagship site which reflects our ambitions to provide top quality community facilities across our property portfolio.”
The £4m Greenhill School project formed part of the council’s Capital Programme and was fully funded by the Welsh Government’s 21st Century Schools Transition Grant.
The single storey building consists of 7 classrooms, a nursery, hall, kitchen, library, ICT room, music room, 2 special resource bases and administration facilities. There is an amphitheatre for outdoor learning, a wetland area, forest walks and soft play areas with outdoor play climbing frames and adventure trail. The external areas also include improved parking facilities and a replacement playing field area and hard surfaced games court.
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