School design: Aims and valuesAims and valuesAims and valuesAims and valuesAims and values26 July/August 2005

If redesigned schools areto offer a learningenvironment fit for the21st century, arguesCaroline Morland, thenthey will have to embodythe values of ourrevamped educationsystem

Buildings fitfor the future

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Design is a problem-solvingactivity that requires the precisedefinition of the problem at the

start. When we talk about BuildingSchools for the Future it is helpful todefine what we mean by ‘schools’. This isbecause when we consider designing aschool for the future it is easy to focus onthe school as a building: a building thatbecomes a learning environment thatinspires young people, staff andcommunity, and that promotes effectivelearning.

If this is the emphasis of our definitionthen Building Schools for the Future is aprogramme for those schools that areearmarked to receive capital funding for anew build or refurbishment over the nexttwo to five years. But if we define a schoolas an organisation – a group of peoplecoming together to achieve a shared goal,to educate members of the community inthe skills and knowledge they need forfulfilling and successful lives – thenBuilding Schools for the Future becomesa movement for the reinvention ofeducation and schooling, an act of designthat needs to engage all members of theeducation and learning community.

To help us rethink some of ourdefinitions and preconceptions aroundschool design, the following series of‘lessons’ can be very useful.

Lesson 1: Asking the right questions“We can’t solve problems by using the samekind of thinking we used when we createdthem.” – Einstein

The world today is full ofcontradictions, but few are moretroubling than this one: in a society

where knowledge and brain power aremore important than ever, increasingnumbers of young people aredisengaging from education. The solutionto this problem is not to do more of thesame or even to do the same moreefficiently or effectively. We are beingchallenged to fundamentally rethink howwe develop brain power.

So where do we begin to get theseinsights? One starting point is to watch andlisten to the young people we want toengage. What is it that they findcompelling? How do they acquire the skillsto text at 100 words per minute? What aretheir ‘big issues’? Young people are

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School design: Aims and valuesAims and valuesAims and valuesAims and valuesAims and values

If we accept a world in which youngpeople need and want to develop the skillsto be creative, independent thinkers,outstanding problem solvers, excellentcommunicators with the skills to worktogether to harness their collective talents,then we can begin to ask really interestingquestions. Questions such as: How do wedesign schools that respond to curiosity andfoster independences and responsibility forlearning, design for exploration, discovery,experimentation and mastery? How doeslearning actually take place? What do weknow about the way people learn? Howcan we harness technologies to supportlearning? And what are the roles of theeducators and practitioners in inspiring andsupporting learning?

Lesson 2: There isn’t one answer“In the future, instead of striving to be rightat a high cost, it will be more appropriate to beflexible and plural at a lower cost. If youcannot accurately predict the future then youmust flexibly be prepared to deal with variouspossible futures.” – Edward de Bono

The new economy is asking us to makea paradigm shift away from the belief thatlearners are empty vessels to be filled withspecific and valuable knowledge towards anunderstanding that the learner is the creatorof knowledge and understanding. In thismodel, education is about people learninghow to engage in and manage theirprocesses of learning for themselves.

Once we accept this shift, traditionalmodels of subject specialism, didacticdelivery and recitative assessment no longermake sense. They need to be replaced byinterdisciplinary thematic content, co-operative learning, and self-directed andauthentic assessment. The key features ofthe new model are diversity and flexibility.Learners focus on mastering their ownlearning processes and those ofcollaborative teams. The knowledgecontent becomes a secondary considerationand should be situationally relevant.

In this world the design challengeshifts away from designing for science orhistory and focuses on the developmentof organisations and environments that

support a variety of learning processes,processes that reflect the differentlearning styles of individuals and thedifferent stages of a learning sequence.We need to build for investigation,research, planning, making, debating,deciding, reflecting and sharing.

The change from one paradigm toanother won’t happen overnight. Schoolswill need to accommodate a number ofpedagogies operating next to each other.We need designs that allow learners toengage in a variety of learning processesthat maximise their potential.

Where do we start looking forinspiration? We need to look to museums,theme parks, zoos and aquariums: retailoutlets that inform as well as sell.

Lesson 3: Solving for the whole problemPeter Senge defines learning as “thecapacity to take effective action”. Thecapacity of a community to take effectiveaction, to create social, cultural andeconomic prosperity, is a public asset. Assuch, the performance of our educationsystem is of importance to the wholecommunity. Community education needsto go beyond offering local peopleopportunities to re-engage with learning.The creation of a learning communitywill require a fundamental redesign ofschooling. Designing schools for thefuture will need the designers to engageactively with the community, tounderstand the community’s definition ofsocial, cultural and economic prosperityand to design a solution that meets thisneed. Designs need to create schools thatprepare young people for work, butbeyond that schools need to help people

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increasingly active around issues such as theenvironment, international development,volunteering and travelling. Large numberswant to run their own business rather thanwork for other people.

The question then becomes one ofhow we support young people indeveloping the skills to be successful in aworld with less rigid structure andhierarchy and more collaboration andfluidity; a world that is rapidly changing,needing continuous problem-solving andadaptation; a world where ideas andimage have the capacity to influencebehaviours and actions, where fashionand celebrity are huge influences.

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participate in the social and culturalactivities of their communities.

Rethinking school with a focus onmaximising people’s capacity to learnrequires us to engage with all the aspectsthat impact on that capacity. We need toengage with the social, financial and healthcontext of the learner and importantlyprovide services that respond to theseneeds. Schools become the gateway to abroader range of services, multidisciplinaryorganisations which provide learning, care,entertainment, health and advisory servicesto all members of the community.

No man is an island, and neither is aschool. In a world where learners areentitled to receive a customised range ofservices to support their individual learningneeds, this support may not come from asingle organisation. Schools can workcollaboratively as a network of provision,with individual schools specialising andoffering diversity while giving the broadestaccess to these specialisms through thenetwork. Increasingly, other institutions suchas museums, care centres, libraries and othersmay come into the network. Learningbecomes a continuous, lifelong process, withpeople sourcing appropriate supportthrough the network as and when needed.

Having accepted that our existingeducation model, while succeeding forsome, is failing to engage and meet thelearning needs of significant numbers ofyoung people, we need to rethink thenature of our education solution. While aprerequisite to Building Schools for theFuture is the design of new learningprocesses and school organisations,ultimately the designs will take a physicalform: an architectural solution in theform of a learning environment.

What are the features of this physicalform? Exemplar designs give us someideas, but ultimately each learningcommunity needs to engage in theprocess of designing their own solutions.Here, then, are seven considerations tomake when designing a learningenvironment for the future.

The first of these is 20:20 foresight.Designshould solve for function as well as form.Schools of the future should accommodate

learning processes and activities for thefuture. The use of future scenarios such asthe NCSL’s FutureSight or Picture This!from the Innovation Units website helppractitioners and stakeholders explore thevalue and implications of a range of futurepossibilities and begin to discuss the natureof design solutions fit for a range of futures.

Secondly we should ponder the nature ofdesign. Few educators regularly engage in theprocess of design and it is helpful to thinkabout and anticipate the nature of thisprocess. Design is a problem-solving activitywhich requires the precise definition of theproblem at the start. Design is concernedwith decisions of taste, choice and sensitivityand relies on your value judgments. It iscritical that the various views of differentstakeholders be actively explored,

understood and reconciled. Design is aniterative process and more interactionbetween learners, educators and designerswill improve the quality of the solution.

Think differently. Look for inspirationoutside the familiar, challenge the statusquo. Listen to young people, look forexamples of inspiration and learningenvironments outside the education sector.

Think of educators as designers. Learn tolove constraints. There is a wealth ofexperience in the design of school facilities,but the experience of designing for futuremodels of learning and education is rare.Part of the design process is to check back tothis experience and ensure that we don’tmake obvious mistakes. The buildingguidelines, area benchmarks and standardsrepresent a critical minimum level of quality

John Taylor GattoThe Underground History of American EducationJohn Taylor Gatto’s most famous essay may well be ‘The Seven-Lesson SchoolTeacher’ (New Society Publishers, 1992), in which he describes – withconsiderable irony – the real lessons that he and other teachers impart to theirstudents:Confusion. Schools attempt to teach too many things. And they present most ofthose things out of context, unrelated to everything else that’s being taught.Class position. Students must stay in whatever class they’re assigned to and must“endure it like good sports”. From that, they learn how “to envy and fear thebetter classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes”.Indifference. Children learn not to care about anything too much. When the bellrings, they stop whatever they’ve been working on and proceed quickly to thenext workstation. “They must turn on and off like a light switch.... the lesson ofbells is that no work is worth finishing.”Emotional dependency.“By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors,and disgraces,” children learn to surrender their will and to depend on authority.Intellectual dependency.“Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.”Conformity triumphs, while curiosity has no place of importance.Provisional self-esteem. Self-respect depends on expert opinion, measured down toa single percentage point on tests, grades, and report cards. Parents would be“surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematicalrecords”, but the system teaches children to measure themselves based on “thecasual judgment of strangers”.Conspicuousness. Children are always under surveillance, in the classroom and evenbeyond. There are no private spaces for children and no private time for them.“Changing classes lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at lowlevels.” Teachers assign “a type of extended schooling called ‘homework’, too, sothat the surveillance travels into private households, where students mightotherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or amother or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood.”

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School design: Aims and valuesAims and valuesAims and valuesAims and valuesAims and values

LinksNCSL future schoolswww.ncsl.org.uk/research_and_development/research_activities/randd-future-index.cfm

The Sorrell Foundationwww.thesorrellfoundation.com/initiative.html

Making better placeswww.cabe-education.org.uk/makingbetterplaces

Building Schools for the Futurewww.bsf.gov.uk/bsf/exemplars_secondary.htm

School Workswww.school-works.org/why.asp

In a society whereknowledge and brainpower are more importantthan ever, increasingnumbers of young people aredisengaging from education

that needs to be achieved. These formconstraints on design but shouldn’t preventinnovation and new and better solutions.

The devil is in the detail – or in otherwords, the design of the interiors of schoolsis critical to their performance. Too often thedetail design of fixtures, fittings andequipment is given insufficient time andeffort. Determining what is needed at thedetailed level is left to overburdened staffwithout the time to research the totality ofwhat is available, or to the supplier with allthe inherent conflicts of interests of thepoacher playing gamekeeper. The samequality of effort needs to be dedicated to theinternal design as is given to the architecturaldesign of inspiring learning environments. Ifthis expertise is not found in house with thearchitect then it is worth the investment ofgetting a specialist FFE designer to managethe design and the supplier’s solutions. Wehave an opportunity to communicate toyoung people their value and the value oflearning by giving schools an equivalent orsuperior quality of interior design as youngpeople experience in retail andentertainment environments and will cometo experience in the work environment. Wecan no longer afford schools to be second-class environments.

Finally, we must reverse one of theprinciples above and think of designers aseducators.How well an environmentperforms depends on two key variables: thequality of the design and the behaviour of

the people using the building. For schools ofthe future to deliver the maximum positiveimpact on learning outcomes, it is criticalthat the people who use the buildingunderstand how it works. It is important toinvest in communication and discussion ofthe interaction between design andoperation. Schools of the future should haveeither a virtual or real instruction manual.

Only 46 per cent of school leavers havegained at least a grade C in both GCSEmaths and English on average since 1997.While this is only one measure, it indicatesthat there is a need for some neweducation solutions to meet the needs ofthe underachieving thousands.

All schools need to engage with theircommunities and begin the process ofrethinking education and reinventing theschools for the future. This is an effort thatgoes beyond the need to design buildings.It is the vision of these new schools thatneeds to inform the design briefs for thenew environments. The more complexchallenge left to policymakers and the

schools not engaged in buildingprogrammes is whether new schools canoperate in old buildings. And having begunthe journey of reinvention, how quicklycan we mobilise the money and effortrequired to build the new solutions?

Caroline Morland is a director and founding

member of the core consulting team of

Edunova, a professional services organisation

which researches and develops good

educational practices

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