The Billericay School - Campus

Campus

Billericay School has A, C, D, E, F and V blocks.

The book Images of England: The Billericay School by Sylvia Kent shows that a B block did at one time exist - it was situated where F block and the carpark are currently located.

'B Block did in fact exist on the greenery, next to the car park, where the footpath now leads from the main gate to 'F' Block.

B block was a two storey wooden structure housing metal and woodworking classrooms on the ground floor and art, pottery, home economics and technical drawing classrooms, on the first floor. During the early 1980, the school Bank was also housed in the block along with classrooms used primary for Economics, Business Studies and typing. It was demolished on the last day of term 1989, it took around 2 hours to pull down.

In 2004, this trend was reversed when a V block was created. It is thought that this refers to the concept of the block being a 'village' community. The V block was built to house the English department, whilst we awaited the new build block. There was a small fire in one of the D block demountables, but the fire itself did not contribute to the installation of V block. However, 2 of the 5 buildings still remain which were not touched by the fire. V block houses the school's English department.

A Block contains mostly Maths classes but some science, French, German, and humanities classes also exist within the building. This was the original building from when the school was first opened. It holds the language department, maths department and Mr Broomhead's science classroom who as been working at the school for about 35 years. It also once had the year 11 common room that was painted by a number of students.

The biggest block at the school. C block It contains mainly Science classrooms. The main wing of the block is a 3 stories high with roughly 1 and a half of these rooms as Science labs. This block also contains the RBLC (Resource Based Learning Centre) more commonly known as the Library, which houses over 30,000 books. It also contains (on the top floor) R.E, Media and Biology science rooms and on the ground floor there are Drama Studios, Music rooms, Student Services and the important sick bay.

Due to a fire only four D block rooms remain. Three of the rooms can be used for a few functions. One is a drama room which is also serves as the Year 11 common room. Two others are used primarily for maths. The last of these rooms is known as the "D-Munchable", it is used primarily as an area where food/drinks can be purchased during the Break and Lunch times. The interior was designed and painted by the School's own students.

E Block is a raising of the school-leaving age (Rosla) building built to house the additional students capacity needed when the school leaving age was raised to a compulsory 16. It is understood that it was sixth form area and common room. This block contains the Art classrooms and the Food Technology and Textiles rooms. Also the Child Development room. F block opened for the first time in September 1988. The original F Block contained the, then CDT Department (downstairs) and the Business Studies Department (upstairs). There were 2 computer rooms, F9 and F5. The server was an RM 286 with 60Mb of hard disk and 1Mb of RAM.There were 3 staff offices downstairs. Later, there was a major rebuild to the front of F Block, enlarging it to take the ever expanding school administrations. The reason for this was the school had become Grant maintained. A system created by the then Tory party, to give more power and money directly to the schools. This then meant more admin in schools. At the same time the Head Teacher's office was moved from C block (now the Withdrawal unit) to a new room in the new F Block.

As ICT (IT then) expanded, the Business Studies rooms, F7 and F10 became computer rooms. Recently F12 has been converted to house a number of PCs as has F1 with the addition of 30PCs to augment the DT graphics lessons.The old print room from A block, now a Humanities room, (previously heads of lower school office) also moved to a purpose designed room in the new F Block. With the progression in print technology, the old ink-based offset printer, that took a whole day to set up, print and clean for a whole school run, was consigned to the recycle bin. New photocopiers and new small self-contained offset printers took its place.