The University of Cambridge is to open a primary school in September as part of the North West Cambridge Development project. Built on 150 hectares of farmland, it will be the site of 3000 new homes and 2000 postgraduate accommodation spaces. It is the university’s largest ever single capital development project.

The University of Cambridge Primary School, a free school established under the Department for Education, is a crucial part of the investment. According to its website, it will not only serve to provide education to 630 children but will be the University Training School, closely linked to the university’s Faculty of Education. It will become one of the 180 schools partnered with the faculty that provides a PGCE programme, currently graded ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted.

An on-site, purpose-built research faculty will explore student learning, teaching and the relationship between the two. A clinical professor will oversee half the research, but local families and other local schools will also play an active role in shaping the investigations.

The research focus of the new school has won praise from some quarters. Second-year Education student Kelly Bowden of Gonville and Caius said: “Everyone thinks they know about best educational practice because they went to school, but there is so much real academic debate surrounding pedagogy.” Despite this strong emphasis on research, the school’s headteacher, James Biddulph, told The Guardian that he is confident that it will not become “a guinea pig school for new ideas”.

For the past three years, Mr Biddulph has been the headteacher of a Hindu Free School run by the Avanti Schools Trust in Essex. Although the Cambridge school will have no specific religious character or faith ethos, Biddulph plans to apply some of the methods used at his previous school in this new role, including the concept of ‘mindfulness’.

Designed by some of the architects behind the London Eye, the building was conceived to embody an open ethos. Every classroom will have an outdoor learning space and there will be no doors, allowing everyone to see each other teaching and learning. The school will be co-educational and mixed ability, with the Admissions Policy foucsing on inclusivity. Biddulph told The Guardian that he believed “learning shouldn’t be a competitive sport that not everyone can succeed at”.

Professor John Rallison, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Cambridge and Chair of the University of Cambridge Primary School Trust, claims on the school website that “[o]ur ambition over time is to create a school that will be a beacon of excellence having both national and international influence”.

The school is due to open in September, after a consultation last May found local support for it. The main area of contention was its being a free school, rather than a school managed by the local authority. The consultation, however, concludes that “The majority of feedback to the proposal to establish [the school] as a free school has been positive.”