John Septimus Roe Anglican Community School Early Learning Centre

As John Septimus Roe Anglican Community School (JSRACS) sought to consolidate their Beechboro campus with their existing Mirrabooka Campus, Hames Sharley prepared a master plan that would see them through the transition and increase their capacity to accommodate new students. The new Early Learning Centre (ELC) is the first of two new buildings to be delivered in phase one of the master plan.

Conceptually, the design echoes the School’s pedagogy to provide a state-of-the-art learning environment beyond its internal walls, setting a precedent for lifelong learning from the very first moment a child attends the school.

The two-storey building utilises the topography of the site to place the learning and play areas level with the main school campus, with an undercroft maintenance and storage facility carved into the slope below, preserving green space and reducing the impact of the built form. This created significant functioning and cost efficiencies, providing maintenance staff with a much better outcome. Ramps and pathways are seamlessly integrated across the sloping site and landscaped play area to meet accessibility and circulation requirements in an unobtrusive and inclusive way.

A nature-based playground has been positioned to capitalise on the sunlit northern aspect, with access and views to the Primary School oval and adjacent play areas of the Pre-primary, enabling children to ‘look up’ to the other school buildings mirroring the progressive education journey. We worked with landscape architects Emerge to provide a playground that encourages tactile learning, with a mix of natural play elements in rough and smooth finishes, a natural creek bed with a water pump, and a lawn area for active lessons.

Inside, the built form’s V-shape planning leverages the views and connection to nature through an open corridor and open veranda design, with vast sliding doors that extend the classrooms outside. Each classroom feels spacious and light with operable windows, raked ceilings, and playful child-scaled window boxes oriented to provide views to landscape whilst blocking out the direct eastern sun. The interior of each building has a strong connection to the surrounding landscape, creating vibrant spaces filled with natural light and framing external views.

The School has a strong relationship with the adjacent Bush Forever, with sightlines to the south that ground the building to nature. The interior palette is inspired by this local natural beauty, drawing on the warm textures of the landscaping to form a neutral base, with pastel hues, keeping young minds engaged and inquisitive. With minimal internal partitioning, the classrooms have loose furniture that can be easily rearranged to configure the space for different activities.

The design is future-proofed for further development, with provision for adding solar power and an above-code air system when costs allow.