Having recently completed a much-needed renovation of the school hall, teachers started to question the design. There was a problem with the acoustics.

Being one of the most frequently used spaces in the school (for assembly, lunch, sports and various lessons), the initial specification was to provide a bright, new and dynamic space to benefit teachers and students alike.

However, this was not the case. In practice, the room delivered poor acoustics and was difficult for teachers to use and for the students to understand. As a multipurpose space the design had to reflect the vast amount of activities that the space is used for and, as a result, suffered from compromise. The walls, floor, windows and ceiling were all hard imperforate surfaces offering little or no sound absorption creating a highly reverberant environment. In practice this was very disruptive effecting intelligibility and children could not understand what was being said.

Armstrong was asked to provide a solution, which arrived in the form of Optima Board – a highly absorptive ceiling system replacing the existing painted plasterboard ceiling. Combined with i-ceilings Sound Field systems the reverberation time has been significantly reduced and the level of intelligibility has dramatically increased providing a practical and functional facility.