Kingsdale is a fast-recovering comprehensive. Don't run away with the idea that because it is in leafy, prosperous Dulwich in South London it must be posh and therefore unrepresentative. No: Kingsdale is a grand piece of 1950s social engineering, a large secondary-modernist block flown in to land, oh irony, right next to the fee-paying prep school for Dulwich College. Kingsdale's pupils are not from the immediate vicinity of big houses with large lawns and SUVs parked in the driveways. They mostly come in from poorer areas further away. This creates a bit of social tension in Dulwich. The locals are not keen on this cuckoo in their nest, these rough kids pouring in and out. But now Kingsdale has been taken in hand.

Presentationally, it has already done just about everything that the Government now says state schools ought to do. It has a uniform. It has been divided into houses. It fast-tracks its most able pupils following an entrance exam at age 11. It has a Saturday school. It is a "centre for excellence" in performing arts. So all the currently modish educational buttons have been pushed. Its exam results have leapt up from its previously abysmal performance. For a co-ed London comp with a high proportion of "special educational needs" children, its results are starting to look respectable. Ofsted is happy. And this was before the £8.6m big architectural makeover, just completed.

Designed by young architects who are starting to get noticed, De Rijke Marsh Morgan (drmm) and funded directly by the government as a demonstration project, this is lateral-thinking stuff. They have taken what was a meanly-designed and decaying former London County Council school with miles of spirit-sapping and sometimes dangerous narrow corridors, and they have turned it into something more resembling the Eden Project in Cornwall. No tinkering about at the margins for Alex de Rijke and his team - they have thought and built big.