A sports hall that has to do three different jobs
Education & Leisure · balancing PE, assembly and sports-booking use
Illustrative worked example. This is a realistic brief run through Echo using the same method a real report uses — not an account of a named past client. See every case study for more, including which of these are real, permissioned projects as they're added.
The brief
A secondary school's sports hall was on the capital works list for a different reason — leaking rooflights — and the PE department used the opportunity to flag what staff had been raising for two years: instructions and safety calls were being lost during PE lessons, and whole-school assembly in the hall meant half the room straining to hear.
Secondary school sports hall, four courts
36 × 20 × 8 m, about 5,760 m³ — sprung timber floor, painted blockwork walls, profiled metal deck roof with rooflights.
A hard floor built for sport, blockwork on every wall and a metal roof deck put the hall's reverberation time well above two seconds — fine for nobody in particular, and the direct cause of both the PE-instruction and assembly complaints.
The standard, and the target
Sport England's design guidance for multi-use halls doesn't set one single mandated figure the way a classroom standard does — it gives a range that balances speech intelligibility for PE and assembly against keeping the hall lively enough for the sport it's built for. The brief here was to get well clear of the two-second-plus starting point, without treating the hall like a classroom.
The constraint
The council's capital budget for this job was fixed by the wider rooflight works and couldn't flex, and the school's own ball-sport safety policy ruled out anything fixed to the walls below 2.5 metres, where a stray ball could reach it.
The decision
The fix stayed at height and within budget: ceiling rafts hung in the bays between the rooflights (so daylight wasn't blocked), high-level wall absorption above the 2.5-metre ball-strike line on the two longer walls, and a heavy curtain divider track was costed as a reserve option for splitting the hall during exams but not taken up this round.
Every route considered, vendor-neutral — we don't sell any of it.
- Ceiling rafts, hung between rooflightsabout 260 m²
The main move — positioned to leave every rooflight clear.
- High-level wall panels, above 2.5 mabout 140 m²
Kept clear of the ball-strike zone per the school's own safety policy.
- Curtain divider track (reserve, not taken up)18 m span
Priced for splitting the hall during exam season — parked for a future budget round, not part of this fix.
The outcome
Rafts and high-level panels brought the hall from over two seconds to roughly 1.3 — comfortably inside the range where PE instructions and assembly announcements stop getting lost, while still lively enough for the evening five-a-side bookings the hall relies on for income.
Indicative figures for this example, from the same method a real report uses. Not a measured survey and not a compliance certificate — where one is required, that's a survey to BS EN ISO 3382-2.
Now do it for your room.
Four questions, sixty seconds. Free to see whether you have a problem.
Check my room →Questions people ask
Why not treat the whole wall, not just above 2.5 metres?
The school's ball-sport safety policy for this hall rules out anything below that line — a real constraint, not a cost-saving guess, so the fix had to find enough absorption from the ceiling and the walls above it alone.
Is 1.3 seconds the right number for every sports hall?
No — Sport England's guidance is a range precisely because a hall used only for exams needs something closer to a classroom, and one used only for five-a-side needs to stay livelier. This hall does three different jobs, which is why the target sits in the middle.
Does this count as compliance with the guidance?
No — this is an indicative design-stage prediction, not a measured survey, and Sport England's guidance is exactly that: guidance, not a regulation with a pass/fail test.