Building Schools for the Future: 5 Lessons for Future Researchers

Please note this article represents only the thoughts and views of Flywheel Ltd, and not its partners or clients.

For those international readers, the new UK government has announced the end of the major school buildings project, Building Schools for the Future (BSF), already being referred to as “Labour’s building schools programme”. We always knew that, some day, Building Schools for the Future would come to an end; the end came swifter than imagined. The most ambitious school building project in the world was to be completed in little more than a decade, rebuilding or refreshing every secondary school in England. When the programme started, it looked hard at the problems with the preceding PFI Schools programme, and attempted to fix those issues. The name itself, BSF, was reflective of the criticisms that we were still building schools that suited 19th and 20th century teaching and learning.

Even the biggest supporters of BSF (often the schools and LAs benefitting, or the industry that sprung up around it) could always tell you its flaws, and there were many who were highly critical of its perceived waste. But, as the programme evolved, so too did some of the ideas and the quality of the schemes, and the ambitions of those working within it.

Dom Norrish of Novatia puts the context of the halt most eloquently:

Are we now well positioned as a nation to provide the next generation of team workers, creative thinkers, collaborative investigators and independent problem-solvers which will characterise the successful economies of the next 25 years? My personal view is ‘no’.

What would future researchers say?

In the last years, we have increasingly looked into the past to understand the problems and issues that prevented previous building waves from embedding more innovative ways of creating a teaching and learning experience and designing learning spaces. We have learned a lot from them, with superb reports like the CfBT’s School Building Programmes, for example, which indicated how previous programmes had failed due to poor engagement and change management with staff at the school.

So, it is interesting to ponder what future researchers may say about BSF, in context, what it achieved, what it failed to achieve, and the legacy it provided that future building projects built on. Because there will be future building programmes, small or large scale, in the UK and in other countries, and they will look at BSF and attempt to learn from it.

The fear I have is that BSF will be judged to have almost, almost got there: but not quite. Historians may say: if only they had had a few more years. This is because, when BSF started, it was still building – in what became an industry catchphrase – “newer, shinier versions of old schools”.   I was personally involved in some of the first school meetings on the first BSF school project in Bristol.  There was no educational vision, no brief.  One of the schools was interested in exploring ideas around schools within schools, conversations that should have been ironed out previously.  The other was happy to stay on safe ground educationally: none of the challenging conversations had been had.  That is no criticism of the school, or the Local Authority, or anyone involved, as this was much as the PFI school era had been.  But, over the next years, several key things happened that began a great shift.

The Shift from Buildings to Teaching and Learning

Firstly, programmes like the National College for School Leadership’s (as it was then) BSF Leadership Programme were created, which began bringing together international lessons and the most innovative ideas and speakers to engage with all school leaders going through the programme, before they wrote their visions (which then linked to the official PfS documentation). This began to create a wave of educated clients. Not all of them wanted to do things differently, but as more of them did innovate, and were brought back into later waves of the programme, more and more schemes began to start from higher bases and were fed back to later participants.

Secondly, exemplar projects like Project Faraday were commissioned which had the flexibility to challenge “the ways things were done”. This again provided stimulus material for change, as did many international projects like Hellerup, or documents like Kenn Fisher’s Linking Pedagogy and Space.

The issue was that it takes many years to build a new school. Projects that focussed on innovation, but were about new build, are only just opening now, when we needed the lessons four years ago. This would not have been as much of an issue if the programme was continuing another five years, but it is not. And so, when historians look back at some of the schools that were built in this period, they will note some amazing architecture, but marvel that within those glorious buildings of glass and steel, we still (on the whole) replicated thirty person classrooms in departments and faculties, where people move around every hour, a creaking system of mass education built for another age.

Counter Shifts and Constraints

There was also the counter shift with BSF that many of those within the school building industry found increasingly frustrating. Even though the programme was predicated on transforming education, not just a building, it was still viewed by the media and many politicians as being essentially a building programme. On BBC news, yesterday, preceding announcements of the cuts were clips of pupils talking about how learning in a classroom that was not freezing would be much better for learning, and a headteacher showing the poor quality of the temporary spaces. This focus on the building missed the point: this was about freeing up the possibility to create better learning experiences that helped learners understand and comprehend knowledge better with more skills, unconstrained by the learning space – in fact, enabled by it, and with technology too. Having a temperate, naturally lit building is the basics, at the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy.

There were, of course, other frustrations. As someone who worked both bidder side, as well as with Local Authorities on briefing, the bid process was always painfully constraining. One project, about to start, had literally four engagement meetings with the schools during the first phase of dialogue. If the brief was not rock solid, designing an innovative school within that period was almost impossible. The contraints on this and other projects were understandable given the timelines involved, but for the design teams, incredibly difficulty to perform to the highest standards of the profession.

Five Lessons for Future Researchers

So what would I recommend to researchers, some time in the future, looking to convey lessons to future participants in a building wave? What are the things we have learned, both from the successes and failures of BSF? These are my five:

1) The greatest innovation around Teaching and Learning happens in the briefing stage

This should require significant time for reflection and consideration, and should be focussed first and foremost on learning, prior to even thinking about spatial implications, and well structured using Design Thinking to allow the best chance of innovating, instead of starting from the current space and looking at how to improve it.   These conversation should be about the needs and requirements of future learners, about pedagogy, about curriculum models and the best way of learning, about how results could be improved and skills could be transformed.  As a result, understanding issues around school organisation (faculties vs minischools or alternatives) and around learning space (not starting from the principle of thirty person classrooms) should be the outputs of this stage, even to the stage of concept design. The curriculum analysis and schedule of accommodation should be outputs, not inputs. Ideally, this stage should also include some degree of pilotting of new spaces, with accompanying teaching and learning.

2) Competitive elements should focus on building and cost, not on design

Design is, by its nature, a collaborative process between client and designer. Designing in a competitive situation often meant that a full and frank discussion could never take place, and “sample” schools within BSF could not have the full benefit of the architects’s skills. Designers and architects should be able to have enough access to schools to get the design right. Constraining this access constrains the scheme. In addition, sometimes great designs within a scheme would not be chosen because a consortium would fall down on other measures in the evaluation.

3) Invest in Engagement and Change Management

New types of spaces require substantial investment in people, especially teaching staff. This requires funding. At times, we felt that with 99% of the capital investment, we could build a more innovative facility and use the 1% to support better engagement through the briefing process, with post occupancy changes in practice achieving better outcomes, than spending 100% on the building. Interestingly, the more innovative spaces that we have been involved with recently, moving beyond the classroom, have required less space and therefore less capital than their traditional counterparts.

4) Prioritise furniture and interior design over inspiring architecture

As I said previously, getting well lit, temperate buildings are the basics we should expect from every school building. Often, however, schemes prioritised amazing and inspiring architecture over creating brilliant learning spaces. Walk around a number of the best looking schools in the country from the outside, and you will see standard classroom chairs and tables on the inside. Less than 3% of the capital of a typical schools project was spent on furniture, despite that being over 80% of your interaction with a space in terms of time within a learning session (as opposed to 20% looking at the building from the outside). I once worked with a school that wanted to create a science facility shaped like a molecule to inspire pupils as they walked within. The internal space would have been bland because the money did not stretch that far, meaning an opportunity to revolutionise science learning was missed. This was an inversion of priority that the school realised very quickly. A focus on fit out can lead to better teaching and learning outcomes.

5) Know the answer to the question: what is a school in today’s society, first

Several times during the last years, commentators have stopped and asked: what exactly is a school in the 21st Century?  Do we need schools at all?  The pace of the progamme has often left that unanswered.  Schools in the US in particular have taken on the challenge with looking at virtual schooling, where increasing numbers of students learn from other locations.

As technology becomes more powerful and more cheap, the buildings we build may change dramatically in function over the course of the following decades.  In the commercial sector, we are beginning to ask the question: if people can do their individual work anywhere, should they be using expensive and valuable real estate?  Should we not focus on making that real estate collaborative?  If you are working on your own, work from home or elsewhere, and use technology to interface with others.  If you have to collaborate, come in and spend face time with others.

Though this scenario is unlikely in the school’s context today, I suspect a greater emphasis on hybrid schooling – a mixture of virtual and physical interactions – may indeed be a solution that allows more efficient use of real estate during forthcoming baby booms whilst allowing greater curriculum breadth and access through services like iTunesU.

Whatever the solution, the idea that a new school has to exist in the same way as its predecessor school is a notion that is outdated and should be debated and challenged at the very early stages of a scheme.

In Closing

There are many other things that BSF challenged and we can learn from.  Spending on technology to expand pedagogy.  Community use and extended services.  The concept of creating a community hub.  Co-locating other services onto one site.

That BSF has been cancelled currently feels like a tragedy to the many people who have put in hard work to schemes that are no longer going ahead. The one line that stands out for me amongst all those on Twitter yesterday was by the DevonBSF team:

We’re finalising a press release and will be posting the information to all our stakeholders very very soon. Disappointed? Gutted. – @DevonBSF

Looking through the list of schools affected or unaffected, many names pop out. Holland Park School, for instance, that I was involved with way back at the beginning of its journey nearly six years ago, that still remains unbuilt despite full designs on the table for several years, and is now stopped. Many others, such as the truly innovative Chantry School in Ipswich, with powerful visions of future teaching and learning, halted in their tracks.

But this will not be the end: the chocolate box of capital investment in school buildings will continue, it will just be in different wrapping, with a different consistency. It is crucial, however, that we do not revert back into thinking just about the cost of fixing roofs and leaks. We had an opportunity to transform education. Let that journey not end, despite the end of this particular capital funding stream, this particular journey. That opportunity still exists, and we will have to make sure that when the money rolls in other ways, we can make best use of it to make learning better, to create our global citizens of not just the next 25 years, but the next one hundred years and beyond.

What are your lessons for future researchers?