Queuing Canopies for School Dining Halls

The latest annual School Capacity (SCAP) survey found that around 18% of educational establishments are at or in excess of capacity. As the education sector seeks to find solutions to accommodate a rising pupil intake, school facilities such as classrooms, assembly halls and school dining areas, face increased levels of congestion.

Lengthy lunchtime queues are a common problem in schools, resulting in bottle necks and circulation issues. By utilising existing outdoor space, however, schools can ease congestion from their dining halls by maintaining an orderly flow of pupils through clearly defined and covered external access routes.

Why Create Queuing Cover?

Creating bottlenecks when dining halls are at capacity, queuing systems can cause significant knock on effects for schools, potentially impacting timetables and lessons for staff and causing frustration among pupils waiting for school meals. Staggered lunch times for different year groups is one way schools deal with this issue.

If space is more readily available, queues can often stretch outside to help ensure organisation and ease congestion, restricting obvious that hinder clear passageways to fire escape routes. However, an absence of effective cover during adverse weather conditions can quickly impact pupil wellbeing, and often lead to health and safety concerns from exposure to harmful UV rays. During winter weather, uncovered queuing spaces can also create an increased risk of injury from slips and falls when any surface water freezes.

For schools, creating queuing cover helps to ease congestion from school dining halls by creating a dedicated outdoor space for pupils with essential weather protection. It provides an increase in scope to help mitigate associated health and safety risks in high traffic spaces, while encouraging pupils to engage in more orderly behaviour. For schools with external servery hatches, creating queuing queuing cover can also help to increase access and boost the availability of ‘grab and go’ lunch schemes.

What About Roof Options?

• Fabric Roof: This type of roofing offers a great balance of shade and shelter for pupils, with the translucent qualities of fabric membrane creating effective, naturally light spaces through positive light transmission. Fabric canopies are also well-suited to busy environments where noise transmission to surrounding buildings needs to be considered, absorbing echo and the sound of rainfall to a greater extent than a hard roof alternative. Of a lightweight design, tensile membrane design requires less structural steel compared with traditional roof coverings, enabling clear spans of column-free space.
• Polycarbonate Roof: Offers a cost-effective solution, polycarbonate roofing offers high levels of light transmission to provide a bright atmosphere, restricting sunlight glare and absorbing harmful UV rays. Structures can be manufactured as a monopitch, symmetric or asymmetric design form, with column positions able to be adjusted. This provides the scope to accommodate varying site layouts and coordinate with adjacent building design. 

Designs for queuing cover can also be fully or partially enclosed with cladding to elevations, typically those most exposed to the elements. Glass or polycarbonate sides increase the weather protection on offer, with the potential to address safeguarding issues at the same time.

Creating Queuing Cover With Streetspace Covered Walkways

Typically linear in format with a relatively narrow cover width, Streetspace covered walkways are custom designed for each project. This ensures the flexibility required to accommodate specific site layouts, such as irregular shaped on-site buildings, and the design of Streetspace covered walkways can be specified to coordinate or contrast with surrounding building design as required.

The design form of a covered walkway will typically be informed by the height of adjacent buildings. TRITON covered walkways are available as freestanding to accommodate changes in level and direction, or wall mounted to reduce the number of columns required in the pathway. In-house design and structural engineering capability from Streetspace ensures that all covered walkway projects meet the desired outcomes, with bespoke structures able to be adapted to meet more challenging briefs.