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Education minister looks to Huntly for efficient offsite builds

Builtsmart founder Phil Leather gave Minister of Education Erica Stanford a tour of a double classroom being built on site.
Builtsmart founder Phil Leather gave Minister of Education Erica Stanford a tour of a double classroom being built on site.
MARK TAYLOR / WAIKATO TIMES

Education minister looks to Huntly for efficient offsite builds
Written by Sarah Morcom / WAIKATO TIMES
Published on:

Education Minister Erica Stanford has got her eye on classrooms that can be built in a tenth of the time for half the cost in Huntly.

Huntly construction company Builtsmart is jumping right into the Government’s preferred option of offsite construction for classrooms, and invited the minister to have a look for herself on Friday.

Currently the company has been working on double classrooms and is in the design stages of two-storey classrooms.

In comparison to on-site builds which “you’d be lucky to get done in six months”, these builds take around seven weeks from the beginning of construction off-site, to the installation of the classroom on school grounds.

Builtsmart founder and owner Philip Leather said this makes a huge difference.

“Building something at a school is quite a drama. You've only got to look the wrong way or have your radio too loud or something. There's always problems,” Leather said.

“So hence we build the whole thing here completely, you get a code of compliance in the factory, and then we go and plonk them on site and just get out as quick as we can.”

Builtsmart founder Phil Leather gave Minister of Education Erica Stanford a tour of a double classroom being built on site.
The majority of construction happens at Builtsmart, before shifting to the school for three weeks of installation. MARK TAYLOR / WAIKATO TIMES

The majority of the work is done on-site over about four weeks before the build is shifted to the school overnight. The work at the site then only takes around three weeks.

In terms of cost, Leather said there’s no question which is more effective.

“I just talked to an architect in Hamilton who's come up with a two-storey design,” he said.

“We're doing our own two-storey design now and I said, what's the cheapest one you've got right now, today?

“It came out to about $20 million just for the classrooms and that was 32 classrooms, so that came out at $625,000 a classroom.

“We've got one that I'm going to show Erica now, same thing four on the bottom, four on the top, and that's at around $227,000.”

Builtsmart classrooms have already been installed at a number of schools around New Zealand, and Stanford said more Waikato schools should expect their own Builtsmart classrooms soon.

Phil Leather and Minister of Education Erica Stanford talk insulation.
Phil Leather and Minister of Education Erica Stanford talk insulation. MARK TAYLOR / WAIKATO TIMES

“We should see more of these types of classrooms all around the country because we are shifting away from on site buildings to more offsite manufactured, which we can do much cheaper and much quicker,” Stanford said.

Builtsmart doesn’t sacrifice any of the warm and dry in their construction, and installs premium A grade glasswool (R1.8) insulation and Mitsubishi heat pumps in each build.

“We have problems with classroom capacity everywhere in the country, and often it's not a lack of classrooms, but a lack of clean, dry classrooms,” Stanford said.

“At the moment we've got classrooms that have mould and mildew and that are not are not dry and safe.

“So it's a combination of growth in certain regions, but also just the fact that half of these classrooms are over 50 years old, so we’re replacing those.”

Earlier this month, Stanford announced a re-jig of the Ministry of Education’s handling of school property delivery, after a ministerial inquiry found the current model was "bureaucratic and inefficient".

With the changes came a new department, separate from the ministry, which would deliver the future of school building projects.

Builtsmart classrooms are already installed at some Waikato schools such as Silverdale School and Cambridge High School.

In the first quarter of 2024, more than 60% of new classrooms were made offsite, rising from below 20% in the last quarter of 2023.

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