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Kim Thomas

Ask children what improvements they'd like to see to their school environments, and their answers tend to be cleaner toilets and smarter buildings. Preferably ones that aren't falling down. And what teachers want turns out to be very similar to what children want, as the Government found out when it carried out Design Quality Indicator (DQI) for Schools consultations for its Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

It's not surprising that many of us find it difficult to look behind cosmetic changes to do with cleanliness and comfort when we think about improving the school environment. As Sean McDougall, then a campaign manager for Learning Environments at the Design Council, pointed out at a Futurelab seminar earlier this year, schools haven't changed very much in over 150 years: "A Victorian teacher would get the hang of a modern school quite easily."

Victorian schools, said McDougall, were designed to meet the particular needs of the Victorian era. They were created to turn out 'obedient specialists': adults who could work in factories, assembling components, or as domestic servants, not people who needed to think for themselves. Those schools of 150 years ago were modelled on churches, where children sat down in rows, with a 'priest' who came in and preached while children listened quietly. Even the organisation of the school year was tailored to society's needs, said McDougall: "The Victorians designed schools around a rural economy, with time off in Easter and summer for planting and harvesting."

So why is it that in 150 years our schools have changed so little, with some still housed in Victorian buildings? Children, at least in secondary school, still sit in rows; there is a teacher at the front of the class, though usually with a whiteboard rather than a blackboard; there are still draughty classrooms and narrow corridors. Yet the modern economy demands that we no longer produce 'obedient specialists' but independent-minded and adaptable adults.

Our imaginations tend to be limited by what we know. Perhaps now, when the Government has a programme in place to replace old crumbling school buildings with modern, environmentally-friendly, ICT-enabled ones, is a good time to ask: what would a school that wanted to produce independent thinkers look like? What kind of environment is suited to personalised learning, encouraging children to take control of their own schooling?

Existing schools are mostly designed according to a single model that has long narrow corridors with classrooms coming off them, and a number of rooms with specialised functions: a science lab, a library, a canteen, possibly an ICT suite. But that model doesn't have to be universal.

Take the International School of Toulouse (IST), designed in 1999 for the children of Airbus employees who had relocated to the south of France. The school has no corridors: instead the classrooms connect to an area that is about four or five metres wide and seven metres high. These areas are carpeted (like the classrooms themselves) to muffle sound, and contain leather sofas, where pupils can sit and socialise. The effect, says Richard Jones-Nerzic, head of humanities at the school, is calming, because the children aren't all channelled together into a long, narrow corridor when they come out of lessons. "The thing visitors always notice is how quiet it is," he says.

The classrooms at IST are small (there are 20 children in each class), and have glass doors and walls. The effect, says Jones-Nerzic, is to create an open, collaborative environment: "I'm welcome to go in the classroom and talk to the teacher or the students. We learn an awful lot from each other just by walking around and looking over each other's shoulders."

One of the themes that emerges from consultations with teachers, says Sarah Hill, head of research at School Works, a non-profit organisation that advises LEAs about the design of school buildings, is flexibility: "Not just a partition in the wall that never gets shut, but an environment that they have control of, that they know how to use, but that they've got ownership over." In a school focused on flexible approaches to learning, teachers don't necessarily have their 'own' classroom, and there don't have to be distinct rooms labelled 'science lab' or 'French room'. Beech Williamson, design manager at Partnership for Schools, which delivers the BSF programme, says that one idea is to have a cluster of classrooms, where there is a central social area surrounded by six 60m square classrooms, or four 90m square classrooms, or two 180m square spaces. The idea is to adapt the space according to particular demands of the occasion or the resources available.

New schools cannot be designed without taking the impact of ICT into account: an ICT-enabled school allows for a more flexible environment, says Williamson: "An ordinary classroom could become a specialist French room by all the interactive whiteboards around the walls becoming three-dimensional environments of Paris at the moment the French teacher walks through the door with the wireless laptop."

The move away from fixed desktop computers to laptops, and the increasing popularity of devices such as smartphones and PDAs, means that learning can take place anywhere. At the IST, as with many new schools, there is no ICT suite because the pupils have laptops and every room has an internet connection (though the school is not currently wireless-enabled). It means, says Jones-Nerzic, that pupils can work wherever they are in the building: "They go into a room, get a bit of power up and away they go."

So, what happens to those Victorian classrooms with rows of chairs and desks? While everyone involved in the design of new schools wants to create schools that are light, spacious and comfortable, only a handful of schools are experimenting with changing the classrooms themselves. McDougall cited the Design Council's involvement in St Margaret's School in Liverpool, which has adopted the 360 degree flexible classroom: instead of standing at the front, the teacher can walk around the classroom, and the children sit on swivel chairs, so they can watch the teacher wherever he or she is. The idea is to involve the whole class in the lesson, without any children sitting at the periphery.

The principle of flexibility can extend even to eating places. "If you have rows of tables with six chairs you're treating these children as cattle, you can't expect them to have respect for food. Dining spaces should be social spaces, with respect for food," says Hill. At Jo Richardson school in Dagenham, designed using the DQI for Schools framework, the dining area has been merged with the main circulation route, offering, says Williamson, "an all-day catering option that can also be used for ad-hoc meetings and socialising."

The Government's extended schools programme suggests that we need to think about the ways in which schools could accommodate the wider community. The facilities at Jo Richardson School, for example, include a crèche, a public library and a coffee shop. Williamson suggests that resources such as the library and sports hall could be owned by an outside body (such as the council) and leased to the school during the day.

Peter Humphreys, chair of Personalised Education Now, believes in taking the idea much further. His ideal school would not be a school at all but an "all-age community learning centre". It would have, he says, "a small community theatre, small community press, TV, radio station, all those kinds of elements which allow any community but on a human scale to express itself to meet, to publish, where the generations can mix." It would share facilities with the community, including "high quality sports facilities, meeting rooms, lecture rooms, flexible spaces in which any group, whether it's formal or informal, can meet."

External spaces need rethinking too. Increasingly there is concern that modern children spend far too much time indoors and not enough playing outside. Traditional outdoors environments in schools can be off-putting, with concrete playgrounds and grass playing fields that are out of bounds for much of the year. A competition in 2001 about school design, run by The Guardian, resulted in a children's manifesto that asked for "a school without walls so we can go outside to learn, with animals to look after and wild gardens to explore." At IST, the outside space includes a Japanese garden and a Mediterranean garden as well as tennis courts and playing fields. There are plenty of ways external spaces can be redesigned - with vegetables plots, conservation areas, quiet secluded areas, wildlife areas and picnic tables as well as play areas. Some of these ideas will take a long time to be accepted, but others are already taking root. The BSF programme offers a huge opportunity for rethinking the design of our schools from scratch. Perhaps the schools of the future will be environments for turning out, not obedient specialists but children who are, in McDougall's words, "inquisitive and challenging."