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Building Schools for the Future: Emerging
Themes
Mukund Patel, head of Schools Capital Assets, Department for
Education and Skills (DfES)
Education has had a higher profile, and higher spending, as a
result of the prime minister’s interest. When elected in 1997,
Tony Blair said his three priorities were “Education,
education and education.” He remains committed to education,
which faces many challenges, including poor student performance
levels and teacher shortages.
Only 14 percent of England’s 21,400 school buildings were
built since 1976. Some of the old buildings are good but don’t
support modern educational practices and technologies. Others are
unexciting, institutional buildings, and some are temporary
structures.
Capital expenditures for school construction have risen, from
£700,000 million in 1996–97 to more than £4
billion this year; and £15 billion are committed over the
next three years, including £2.2 billion a year for secondary
schools.
The prime minister wants to do more than upgrade all secondary
schools; he wants to transform them over a 10-year period, starting
with the areas with the lowest performance. The question: What to
build? There was pressure to build quickly at a time of rapid
changes in the educational field. We wanted buildings that would
enhance teaching and learning, help to raise standards, and address
workforce issues. We appointed 11 architects, selected for their
demonstrated creativity, to partner with schools to create designs
of exemplars that could educate clients and influence the direction
of designs to come. (See www.teachernet.gov.uk/schoolsforthefuture/index.htm.)
A review of these 11 schemes reveals common themes:
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• Flexible and adaptable. Different kinds
of spaces (most English schools lack a commons area); clusters of
classrooms; allowing for future changes (moving walls); responsive
to changes in information communications technology (e.g., plasma
screens, wireless laptops on trolleys, interactive whiteboards);
relocatable “learning pods”
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• Good social spaces. Better circulation
(wider circulation areas and open-access learning areas); creating
a heart of the school (many English schools don’t have one);
breakout spaces; toilets (getting it right so students keep them
clean and graffiti-free)
• Inspirational buildings. Sense of identity
(too many schools are institutional); attractive landscape (many
English schools are green deserts that aren’t used as an
instructional resource); design that captures the imagination
• Inclusive design. Full social and
instructional inclusion of pupils with special education needs and
disabilities; community use beyond the school day; extended use
through joint facilities such as the library (seeing the building
used all day changes the way students view the school)
• Comfortable, sustainable buildings. Natural
daylight and ventilation; good acoustics (protection from external
and internal noise); sustainable materials; innovative ideas.
Our agency has other projects under way. Eighty-five City Learning
Centers have been completed by retrofitting old schools. Another
project is Classrooms of the Future, with 21 of 26 innovative pilot
projects completed. The Joined Up Design for Schools program sent a
designer to each of 60 schools, with the pupils as the client, to
develop a project brief and present it to the board of governors;
the projects were then exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum
(see www.thesorrellfoundation.com).
Commission for Architecture and the Built
Environment
Joanna Averley, director of enabling, Commission for
Architecture and the Built Environmment (CABE)
The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
(CABE) is a government agency that serves England exclusively. Its
2004–05 budget is £12.5 million, and its staff of more
than 80 people represent a variety of practitioners, including
architects, town planners, urban designers, and landscape
architects. (See www.cabe-education.org.uk.)
Enabling means advising clients in creating excellent buildings.
Through government agreements, the Enabling Department conducts
design reviews of about 600 significant projects each year; though
it’s rarely needed, the department has the authority to set
projects aside that do not achieve the standards.
We believe good design can be defined and measured. We talk to our
clients about the principles of good design: aesthetic
attractiveness, innovation, flexibility, and benefit to the end
user. We emphasize build quality, imaginative reuse, innovation,
sustainability, light and air, functionality and fitness for
purpose, accessibility and circulation space, quality of external
environment, community spaces and facilities, sensitivity to place,
good value, and efficiency.
Good urban design has character, continuity, and enclosure. It
enhances the quality of the public realm and facilitates ease of
movement, legibility, adaptability, and diversity. It’s about
the spaces between.
The Housing Market Renewal program targets communities with
economic problems. Many of England’s cities have decaying
housing stock in need of upgrade and diversification. We see
schools as a linchpin of renewal and education buildings as
community hubs. We want to replace the housing estate—designed
for nowhere but found absolutely everywhere—with
community.
How can we measure success? We can look at jobs, floor space,
people, homes, and investments. Does a new park raise house prices?
Yes. Over its lifetime, how much of a school’s cost is spent
on design fees? Perhaps 3 percent. How much will educational
achievement scores improve when the facility goes from poor to
excellent? More than 10 percent.
We advise clients about how to push the envelope in school design.
The funding system set up 12 years ago to transfer the risk to the
private sector also introduced a disjuncture between the architect
and the client, so the public sector has had little involvement in
the design process. We are trying to reenergize that. A design
advisor sits with the client, helps with brief development, and
works with designers. That role has been missing; it has been more
about lawyers and accountants. We are trying to put the design back
in. We work with selected projects, gather the best practices, and
disseminate them through publications specific to the various roles
in the design process.
Working with other agencies across England, we have developed a set
of Design Quality Indicators (DQIs). We have an online
questionnaire that helps our clients rate what’s important to
them. All sorts of people, who play different roles and have
different perspectives, get together during the briefing stage.
They can also use this tool to evaluate the plan, and,
postoccupancy, it can help them feed their learning into the next
project. (See www.dqi.org.uk.)
The DQI questionnaire addresses three critical areas: functionality
(the building’s usefulness); build quality (its engineering
performance and structural stability as well as systems, finishes,
and fittings); and impact (sense of place, effect on community, and
environment). It also encompasses the wider effect its design may
have within the design and construction community.
We play the role of design champion, someone with authority who can
challenge the process and say the difficult things. The
public-private funding scheme pushed design off to the edge. We
help people understand what the architect is doing and see the
differences in quality over time. Contractors (i.e., private
partners) say they like not having to guess; they want to
know what the schools need. Innovation comes from the
public partner’s ability to effectively communicate its
needs.
City Academies Program
Paul Kalkhoven, RIBA, senior partner, Foster and Partners,
London
The City Academies program targets failing secondary schools in
run-down city areas. The aim is to demolish and replace 200 schools
by 2010, with the freedom to bring innovation and a new way of
teaching. All the schools we have designed have different visions,
developed by the headmaster or sponsor, and all have a
specialization, such as science or the arts. They all faced common
issues: educational malfunction, building stock in need of
regeneration, discipline and supervision, security, integration of
IT, clarity of circulation, sustainability, flexibility, community
use, and inclusivity.
As architects we faced unique design challenges: building new
schools next to operating old schools on small, inner-city sites as
well as replacing schools that had been failing for a long
time.
A major issue in schools is to motivate pupils and to encourage
civilized social interaction. Communal spaces are the key to this
as well as establishing a central focus and identity for the new
schools. We looked for applicable lessons in modern higher
education and office spaces. We took lessons from the James H.
Clark Center at Stanford University, which our firm designed. The
labs are great, but it’s bringing people together that
generates creativity, and the furniture on wheels gives it
flexibility.
Sustainability is important in new buildings. We reviewed the
design of a school in the south of France, where we used sun
shading, a ventilated concrete roof, and old-fashioned principles
of passive cooling to create an energy-efficient design. More
advanced systems are available, but they are expensive; so building
form and orientation and passive cooling methods are having more
impact. They also introduce daylight and natural ventilation.
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Although teaching spaces tend to be similar, there are lots of
ways to put them together and to create communal spaces in between
that are more than circulation spaces. We start each new commission
with a thorough analysis of the brief and an understanding of the
educational objectives. Our firm has been commissioned to design
nine academies. Two of them have been built and are operational,
three are under construction, and four more are on the drawing
board.
The Capital City Academy has a sports
specialization. Its long, linear footprint illustrates the impact
of working around an existing building. Because it sits on a sloped
site, the central hall is a ramp that descends a full story. (See
www.fosterandpartners.com.)
The front section of the Bexley Business Academy
houses a library and other public-access spaces. Three wings,
separated by courtyards, contain classrooms. Adjacent breakout
spaces are important for flexible teaching. Louvered window
coverings allow teachers to control light in the classrooms and
protect the full glass façade from the outside. The school
is easy to supervise and navigate, with enclosed courtyards and
gallery circulation. Designed for flexibility, the school has a
steel structure that can be changed in the future.
The West London Academy’s specialty is
business studies. Because of its size, it’s organized in pods,
each with a unique character, which share a central courtyard. The
school’s arc is shaped by the roadway on the back.
The London Academy is also large (1,425 students),
so we created upper and lower schools in separate blocks, a design
that combines a personal place, where you can find your own tutors,
with access to common areas.
At 2,200 students, Peterborough’s Thomas Deacon
Academy is one of the largest secondary schools in
Britain. Concerns about students feeling lost in the crowd led to a
design that divided the school into six colleges, each with a
unique identity. The classrooms form a “ribbon” around
the shared spaces. The sports area, restaurant, and other noisy
activities are located in a separate block that can be opened up
after hours without opening the whole school.
The Folkstone Academy groups students from the
first form to year six in houses, to create a sense of belonging
and identity within a larger school. To avoid having all 1,400
students enter through one door, there are two entries, through
which students move first into their houses and then into their
classrooms. It is based around the English tutorial system;
students eat in their houses with their housemates, and teaching
takes place elsewhere.
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