Jemma Saunders from Crown Paints shares tips on using colour in primary school design so that spaces are easier to navigate for young children’s wellbeing
Designing a primary school is a tough balancing act; educational spaces must encourage creativity, inspire learning and sociability, without overstimulating pupils.
Colour can help designers tackle this challenge. Dividing classrooms into different zones, some with stimulating, bright colours, and others with relaxed, muted hues, can create multi-purpose teaching areas. Palettes composed of earthy, natural colours, can help nurture a feeling of connection to nature. And colour-coding can make schools far more navigable for young pupils.
Where to start with choosing colours? Colour choice has a huge role to play when it comes to designing primary schools. All colours have different properties, which can help schools to fulfil their many different functions. However, when picking palettes, it’s important to bear the school’s pre-formed colour scheme in mind.
Logos and uniforms give schools innate, strong colour associations. So, it’s important to use appropriate, related tones. For example, 30 red jumpers against a deep green wall could lead to a lot of unpleasant visual stimulation.
Getting in the zone
In nurseries and primary schools, colour zoning is a particularly effective technique for these multi-purpose spaces. It can help to establish separate creative and calm spaces, while helping children to navigate the school.
Bright, powerful hues should be used in a zone intended for creativity and socialising, with more muted colours used in another part of the room to create a relaxing space. Blending these zones gradually into a white transition point can give the room a sense of balance and order.
Young children respond favourably to bright colours. Vibrant hues encourage play and creative learning. As a result, they’re great for this stage of education which is based around exploration. Balance is critical though. It’s easier to fire kids up than to calm them down – which is something that should always be considered when it comes to classroom design.
Colour-zoning needn’t be confined to individual classrooms. Navigating around schools, which can feel like labyrinths of indistinguishable corridors, is often challenging for primary aged pupils. Zoning can help with this, by linking specific colours to specific rooms. Choosing a blue door for a bathroom and a red one for a classroom, for instance, will help children find their way easily.
Go-faster stripes
School corridors and stairwells are high traffic environments. When the bell sounds at the end of a lesson, children pour into the corridors, bustling their way through to their next class or break time.
Corridors are great spaces for using bright colours. Strong colours, also known as ‘fast colours,’ tend to encourage movement. Hence, powerful hues which might be over-stimulating in a classroom environment can work brilliantly. Vibrant, exciting colour – like an electric pink or a lively blue can really energise the space.
Similarly, stairwells and corridors are also great spaces for using dynamic patterns. Painting contrasting colours in horizontal or diagonal stripes gives the space an added sense of movement, speed and joy.
Busy environments are naturally more prone to knocks and stains, and might need more cleaning as a result. So, it’s advisable to use products with a scrubbable matt finish which can be cleaned thoroughly without compromising the final finish and keeps colours looking their best.
Bringing the outside in
Biophilic design has become an increasingly common feature of schools, with an emphasis being placed on making sure children can constantly connect with nature, to make them happier and healthier.
This has seen a rise in different forms of outdoor learning – teaching a maths class outside, or cultivating a vegetable patch, for instance. It’s also triggered an uptick in the use of natural colours and finishes indoors.
Using natural colours indoors can strengthen the feeling of connection to nature. Earthy browns and reds can create particularly warming, comfortable spaces, but watery blues, teals, and plant-like greens can also achieve a natural feel. The endless variety of colours visible in the natural world means that whatever the school’s pre-existing colour scheme, there should be an appropriate palette available.
Colour can be used to support a school’s function in a great variety of ways. Most importantly though, every element of a school’s colour palette needs to work with its uniform, logo and natural colour way. No matter how pleasing a colour scheme is on its own, it’ll prove visually disturbing if it clashes with the school’s established strong colour identity.
Jemma Saunders is colour consultant at Crown Paints