• Client: Dubai College
• Location: Dubai, UAE
• Solution: Whiteboard walls integrated into classrooms, corridors and breakout spaces, combined with acoustic wall panels in shared areas
• Scale: approximately 300 m² of whiteboards and 150 m² of acoustic panels
• Application: Classrooms, circulation spaces and breakout areas

A classroom whiteboard wall is a familiar specification: fixed to the front wall, sized to the teaching group, used during lessons. Corridors and breakout spaces are rarely specified with the same intent, even though students spend a significant part of the school day moving through or gathering in them between lessons.

Treating those in-between spaces as writing space rather than just circulation space was part of the brief at Dubai College, and it meant specifying whiteboard walls well beyond the standard classroom count.

A long whiteboard wall runs the length of one corridor, mounted flush with the surrounding wall finish rather than sitting on top of it as an obviously separate fixture. In a breakout lounge, a whiteboard is set directly into the timber wall panelling next to soft seating, positioned as part of the space’s finish rather than as an add-on. In both cases, the writing surface reads as architecture first and equipment second.

That distinction matters for how the surfaces actually get used. A whiteboard that looks bolted onto a corridor wall invites hesitation. One that is built into the same finish as the rest of the space invites use.

In one small meeting space, a whiteboard sits directly alongside an acoustic felt panel within the same timber surround, next to a wall-mounted screen for video calls. The two surfaces are specified together rather than as separate purchases: the whiteboard for writing and presenting, the acoustic panel for sound absorption in a room built for conversation rather than lectures.

Combining a writing surface with acoustic treatment in one wall system is a practical response to smaller shared rooms, where a hard whiteboard surface and untreated walls can otherwise make a compact space sound harsher than it needs to.

The corridor whiteboard wall at Dubai College is not photographed empty. It carries a worked mathematics problem, in the kind of handwriting that suggests a student stopped, thought something through, and carried on. That is the practical test for a whiteboard wall placed outside a classroom: whether it gets used unprompted, in the gaps between lessons, rather than only when a teacher schedules it.

In a flexible classroom, the same principle applies at a larger scale: a full-length whiteboard wall running alongside clustered group tables, giving a room organised for group work the same continuous writing surface a traditional row-seated classroom would only offer at the front.

Discuss your project with our specialists, or visit our whiteboard wall for education page to see how classrooms, corridors and shared spaces can be specified together.