DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR LINEAR SEMI-OPEN PLAN CLASSROOMS: CASE STUDY ON IMPROVING THE ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT IN A MODERN PRIMARY SCHOOL

The modern primary school pertained for this paper is a past exemplary primary school in Scotland with linear semi-open plan classrooms. Its acoustic environment was viewed as unsatisfactory by the school, despite the acoustic design being generally aligned with recommendations given in some well-recognised documents. This school was looking for improvements, while maintaining its openplan nature was not compromised. This paper describes the assessment of the acoustic environment by onsite measurements and a 3D acoustic modelling for speech intelligibility. It investigates a series of possible improvement measures individually, and compares their effectiveness and efficiency in improving Speech Transmission Index (STI) scores. The analysis results in some general design strategies for linear semi-open plan classrooms to achieve satisfactory speech intelligibility and privacy.