Window dressing

pete quentin, 25 July 2008

The government’s pledge to re-build every secondary school in the country, together with the rapid rolling-out of the academies programme, has put school design at the forefront of the DCSF’s mind. Apparently not, according to the government’s architectural advisers who this week have expressed serious concern over the ‘substandard’ designs of the majority of current plans. Rather worryingly, the design quality architects propose to local authorities is currently largely irrelevant to whether their bid for the contract is successful. As a result, it turns out that 21 out of the 24 proposed school designs seeking planning permission today are, the people at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, tell us, unsound.

However, whilst overlooking this somewhat fundamental aspect of rebuilding clearly exposes a serious weakness in foresight/planning/spending, how much impact can a ‘well-designed’ school actually have on educational standards, the name of the game? Judging by the academies programme’s emphasis on bricks and mortar, the expectations are enormous.
Inaudible teachers and/or water regularly gushing through the ceiling clearly impact significantly – and negatively – on learning, yet whilst evidently not enough thinking has been put into school design by the architects, much too much thinking has been put into their design when it comes to the educationalists (or bureaucrats) involved in the school improvement drive.
On buildings, academies really are the prime example. The main purpose of the academy is to raise standards in underperforming schools. Doing so involves re-branding and re-building the school (either on the existing site or elsewhere) with hefty investment both from public and private funds. The cost of an academy is considerably higher than ‘normal’ maintained schools, a difference largely accounted for by initial investment in the building, rather than for example, smaller classes or more teachers.
As academies have opened up and down the country, the academy building itself has been a focal point. The rhetoric from the DCSF as well as each academy’s website centres heavily on an impressive, generally ‘innovative’, school premises. (See Stockport Academy, for example).
A nice environment can undoubtedly have a very positive effect on pupils – however it is unrealistic to expect it to have a transformative effect on their learning. And yet this is what, in the main, in terms of expenditure (with expenditure in practice the greatest differentiator) distinguishes the academy from the mainstream maintained school.
The problem with this approach to school improvement is that it is mere window dressing, in its most literal sense. Aside from the unrealistic expectations about a brighter environment, the expense of the building means that investment is being diverted away from true potential transformers. To point to two rudimentary ones: firstly, the heavy focus on secondary underperformance blindly misses the root cause in schooling: learning deficits through weaknesses in feeder primary schools. A far better investment in many cases would be to address the under-achievement at secondary level caused by innumeracy and illiteracy at primary level. Secondly, investment which addressed the learning environment beyond the four walls would be much more effective, and comparable in cost. The key to helping disaffected students who are unable to cope with the curriculum is to enable teachers to respond to their needs. When it turns out that their needs are not in fact aesthetic but pedagogical, the best solutions are smaller classes with more teacher-pupil contact time.