Opposite EdCity’s nine-floor office building sits the prestigious White City House, a private members’ club in the Soho House group that is open only to the media and arts elite – and housed in the iconic former BBC Television Studios.
While the new mega-development also has some swish facilities (an events space, theatre and podcast studio – and you can become a member, too), unlike the Soho House, its whole point is community inclusion, not exclusion.
Lucy Heller, chief executive of the Ark Schools academy trust, puts her jacket over her head as we step out onto Ed City’s fourth-floor balcony to peer across an utterly sodden west London skyline.
She points out the White City Estate below, a sprawling maze of council homes housing around 4,000 people, in Shepherd’s Bush, which sits next to Ark’s White City Primary Academy. Behind us is Grenfell Tower.
The wider skyline is peppered with cranes next to half-built housing blocks – part of a huge regeneration project which aims to deliver 6,000 new homes and 10,000 jobs.
“We wanted to make sure that the regeneration in this whole area really percolates through to the estate,” Heller says.
EdCitizens
While EdCity does not officially launch until next week, I have been invited (their first guest, I’m told) to check out the unique £150 million development, a striking example of what can be achieved when trusts and councils work together.
Years in the making, the joint venture – funded between Hammersmith and Fulham council and philanthropic donors at Ark Schools’ sponsor, Ark charity – has turned a school’s run-down and often waterlogged playground into a whole new community.
Alongside the new office block, the regeneration includes a rebuilt primary school, a new nursery, youth hub, adult education centre and more than 100 “genuinely affordable” homes for locals.
The nine-story office block will offer four floors of office space at a below-market rate for education organisations. Ark’s head office, of around 100 people, moved in last week.
Tenants already signed up to join them include Lift Schools (formerly AET, the country’s third biggest trust), physics charity The Ogden Trust and not-for-profit Purposeful Ventures.
Not everything is finished yet. Phase two – which includes the homes and nursery – will be completed in a year’s time. But it is already mightily impressive.
Community anchors
The project also embodies many live education policy discussions. It is a very shiny example of an academy trust becoming a “community anchor”, something called for by the Confederation of School Trusts (CST).
Heller describes the primary school previously as a “huge and unwieldy site”. Some parts of the playground regularly became waterlogged and were unusable. Another part of the site, owned by the NHS, was all but abandoned.
“Along with the local authority, we came up with the concept which was going to mean not only could we rebuild the primary … but we could bring the White City Estate into the wider regeneration that has taken place around [the area].
“They were very keen to get the youth facilities – which are in sight of Grenfell.”
There was a “sense of the needs of the young children in the area not being met adequately. It just came together that we could do all these things at once.”
It also fits in with what seems to be a new dawn of academy trust collaboration, instead of competition.
“We hope it will act as a kind of hub,” adds Heller. “There’s a training space, a podcast studio, a theatre, an assembly hall, co-working space. We hope people become members of Ed City.
“It’s cheap to join [£50 annually to use the flexible working space], to have it as a base if you are located outside London, but coming down here.”
Those joining will be known as EdCitizens.
‘Time trusts learn from each other’
Heller says the academy movement had been fuelled until now largely by competition (“which is great and really important”).
“But, particularly in a period where there’s no money, we need to move beyond that – and think about how we collaborate more effectively.”
Covid made a big difference. Heller points to weekly CST meetings at the height of the pandemic being “really important in bringing people together. It meant that people got to know and see each other.”
Ark wants to host events where schools and trusts can showcase their specialisms.
“I think it was always a pity that the DfE didn’t capture some of the intellectual property that was created right back at the beginning of the academies movement,” she adds.
“Just the experience of people, whether it’s how to run estates or behaviour policies, those things all of us were having to do it on our own, and not necessarily learn from each other.”
Heller also points to other trusts doing similar. Delta Academies Trust, for instance, has the Education Exchange at its own headquarters next to De Lacy Academy, in Wakefield.
She said other trusts are now also looking to follow them. But can smaller trusts – or those without such generous donors – afford to play such a role?
Ark charity gave the trust more than £10 million in 2023, accounts show. Nearly all of this was for the primary school rebuild, but £700,000 was for extracurricular activities, and another £200,000 for mental health and digital transformation initiatives.
“Scale helps”, Heller adds. But “thinking about how you create spaces for schools to collaborate, how we come together, that’s something that I think anybody could do.”
Money raised from the office block, owned by Ark charity, will create an endowment to be reinvested. While some will go to the trust, most will help the charity to continue to incubate new education ventures. Those already established include Ark Curriculum Plus, NowTeach and Ark Start, an early years organisation.
“The motivation behind this [EdCity] is a commitment not just to the communities we work in, but the education sector as a whole,” Heller adds.
Schools as hubs
The development also fits into the new government’s push to rebuild some of the wider support services for families that have been decimated over the past 15 years – but with schools at the heart.
“Ark Schools has been around for 20 years, and we’re looking at the vision for the next 20.
“How do you look up after such a long time spent in Covid looking down? One of those pieces is definitely about how you situate the school in the community, and make sure it is really acting as a hub for that.
“In a world where there’s not very much money, making sure that the different areas of the public sector really work together is critical.”
She wants the new government to “incentivise” such collaboration.
“It’s not about having more money, but it’s about using it really effectively to work together to do things.”
But is that the role of schools?
“The first and most important thing you have to do is to run good schools and provide great education.
“You’re trying to avoid schools having an enormous burden. I don’t want schools to become the NHS.
“But you’re saying schools have an estate, have relationships that are deep and long-founded with parents. We should be making use of those to sort of drive the health service.”
The West Youth Zone on site, part of the Onside Network, opens when the school closes, ensuring that children have “somewhere to go, something to do and someone to talk to”, says its chief executive, Elanor Gunn.
“A lot of thought goes into the 15 per cent of a child’s waking hours spent in school – but what about the other 85 per cent?”
Data shows that more than 1,200 council-run youth centres have closed since 2010.
Membership for West is £5 a year, with 20 activities every night including art, music and cooking. They have youth workers in every space and provide hot meals for £1.
Most of the school’s pupils aged over 8 are among its 2,400 members.
“We want to be near communities that need it the most, but it takes people involved locally to have that vision – it has allowed us to tap into that ambition and be part of something bigger,” Gunn adds.
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