lt's all about vision: building PRIMARY schools for the future
June 2008
“You can take the teacher out of the classroom but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher.” That was the thinking of one local authority employee engaging with the challenge presented by the 15-year, £7 billion Primary Capital Programme (PCP), which aims to rebuild, revamp and remodel 8,000 of England's 18,000 primary and primary special schools. But surely, if we are to take this opportunity to build learning environments that are fit for education in the 21st century, that’s the crux of the problem.
In fact the classroom itself is increasingly seen as the final stumbling block to the imagination in both the massive Building Schools for the Future programme, aimed at redeveloping secondary schools, and PCP, which is already underway in 23 ‘pathfinder’ authorities.
Most adults’ experiences of learning have taken place in a classroom. But, for schools to re- imagine their learning spaces to meet the needs of today’s learners, they have to face the challenge of thinking differently.
Professor Kenn Fisher is an internationally-renowned expert on designing learning spaces. Australia-based, he has been involved in ambitious school design projects all over the world and advises the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He sounds the death knell for the traditional classroom.
Visiting the UK recently to talk to school leaders involved in PCP (and BSF) on behalf of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), he outlined his approach - namely to model learning spaces against pedagogy, and the kinds of teaching and learning that will take place within them. And he warned of the dangers of limited choices: “Unless you are careful you could end up with classrooms again,” he says. “I just don’t believe that classrooms are the way forward. For programmes like PCP I would hope that you would be looking at good case studies and best practice of alternatives to classrooms.”
Fisher insists that the process for designing a new school, or remodelling an old one, has to start with a clear vision of the teaching and learning that takes place there, that can be shared with the designers and the stakeholders. “All the parties have to learn to speak the same language and fully understand each other. Only then can good design emerge to support the vision.”
The challenge of developing that vision needs to be taken on by leaders, teachers, pupils, parents and other stakeholders - all working together, looking at case studies of innovative (and not so innovative) new school design. They should visit other schools locally and further afield, if necessary, to see what is possible – or avoidable. In an ideal world, the design process itself should become part of the curriculum.
Schools should not overlook the contributions of their own pioneering teachers, says Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. “I think we need to recognise the innovation that is already going on.
Take the use of mobile phones in school, for example. Those on the ground are going to have to start making a stand and say ‘we are dying to incorporate this into our future’. Now we have the opportunity to build schools for the future, we really need to be brave about curriculum and policy issues.”
Sharrow School, an acclaimed new-build in Sheffield that amalgamated former primary and nursery schools, took five years to emerge and incorporated a great deal of consultation and stakeholder engagement. Headteacher Lynne Ley says, “We tend to be very tunnel-visioned. We get into our classrooms and something takes over us. It’s really hard to shift your thinking, and I welcomed views from all the people who were party to the discussion of what a new school should offer. That was crucial in developing my thinking. You have to think about what teaching and learning will look like in the future. Think of how much it has changed in the last five years alone in terms of technology. I knew we had to link teaching and learning so much more to the development of ICT.”
Her bottom line is that visioning should have no limits: “Our visioning did not include thinking about the brief. Don’t be restricted by the brief - don’t let that dominate your thinking. Think about that you want, your philosophy. And then think about how you can fit that into your brief. And don’t be prescriptive.”
Ley reinforces the point by urging others not to let their current and past working practices define where they want to be. “Put those out of the window and start with a blank sheet of paper. You need to believe that you have the ability to do that,” she adds.
A good starting point is to come up with a small number of core ideas that encompass your strategy. Sharrow’s were: changing learning spaces; inside-outside learning; the involvement of the community; and making sure that the building is open 24 hours a day and, if necessary, 52 weeks a year. “Doing this will give you not what you think you should ask for but what you never dreamed you could have,” explains Ley.
Sharrow’s experience is shared with its ‘construction buddies’ and the rest of the world at ‘Brix and Morta’, a blog written by those involved in the project over two years to give a sense of the journey they went through.
The visioning process should not be different for schools that will be remodelled rather than rebuilt, no matter what compromises eventually have to be made, urges Mike Schofield, Head of Haxby Road Primary School in York, who chairs the NCSL’s think tank on PCP. “If you are remodelling it is even more important to start with a vision of teaching and learning because, if you don’t, all you will get is a lick of paint, new desks perhaps, and nothing much else will have changed. You certainly won’t get transformation. To get that, you have got to be prepared to take risks.”
Hannah Jones, Director of the PCP and BSF leadership programmes for the NCSL, thinks that schools are getting better at avoiding off-the-shelf school designs: "Local authorities and school leaders have the opportunity to completely rethink their educational provision and learning environments,” she says. “At school level the first and most important question to ask is ‘what sort of learners would we like?’ It's a question to share as soon as possible with all staff, pupils and the local community.”
The second, she continues, is: “‘What environments, both physical and virtual, will deliver our aspirations for learners?’ We should not forget that 743 new primary schools have been built since 1997 and we should learn from their experiences, insights and cautions - their problems as well as their successes. At local authority level there have been 23 PCP pathfinder authorities, and many more that have been involved in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme are now building on their experiences and linking their work on BSF with PCP.”
Addressing local authority staff at a recent NCSL conference for those involved in PCP pathfinder schemes, Futurelab Research Director Keri Facer summed up the point about developing a vision, telling them: “When we are thinking about technology, can I predict what is going to exist in 15 years? No. But it’s not about that at all. It’s about understanding the trends, the ways in which we work and learn, and the sorts of general currents of development in the future.”
She concluded with a challenge: “I am looking for a school to join me in a school design experiment. What would a school look like if we thought of learning as missions, if we thought of the headteacher as the chief wizard? How might that metaphor give you a different way of thinking about what you are doing in your school spaces - and I am not talking about the technology but the ideas. What would a school designed as a game look like?” It was heartening to see that her imagination was matched by the school leaders present - yes, she had takers. Let’s hope that they keep that game in mind when redesigning or rebuilding their own primary schools. Watch this space...
Further information
‘What if...? Re-imagining Learning Spaces’: www.futurelab.org.uk/whatif
Fountaineers: www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/fountaineers
A video interview with Kenn Fisher, and the presentations he made during his March 2008 visit to the UK are available on the NCSL website: future.ncsl.org.uk
Rubida Research: www.rubida.net
Work with the Victoria State Government including a case study of The Australian Maths and Science School: www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/knowledgebank/pdfs/linking_pedagogy_and_space.pdf
Details of the NCSL Leadership Programme for BSF and PCP: future.ncsl.org.uk
Elizabeth Hartnell-Young: www.nottingham.ac.uk/lsri/ehy
Brix and Morta - Sharrow School construction buddies blog: sharrowconstructionbuddies.blogspot.com
Sharrow School: www.sharrow.sheffield.sch.uk
‘The Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools’, by Prakash Nair, available from Amazon