This week, an architect explains why school design matters – and warns that current policies will damage pupils’ education.
“I’ve been working as an architect for eight years, mostly for a practice specialising in commercial and education projects. Recently the Building Schools for the Future programme has been one of the most buoyant sectors, and we got heavily into it. Then [education secretary] Michael Gove axed the scheme.
The first thing to say is that school design is important: it affects how people behave, how they learn, and their wellbeing and happiness. The quality of a school sends a message to the children; if you give them a functional, smart new building, you’re saying that they’re valued and respected. I remember rebuilding one school, which had two entrances: we built nice new reception area on one side, and in the end all the kids would walk round the long way to use that entrance. The head teacher would stand welcoming them in, and she said that the change in their behaviour – their newfound pride – was incredible.
As time went on, BSF did create some great buildings, but it wasn’t a great system. Our skill as architects is to sit down with clients – in this case, head teachers – and find solutions to knotty technical, engineering, spatial and strategic problems to meet the needs of the end users. In BSF, however, the client was a multi-headed monster. We were employed by contractors, which had formed bodies with councils, which had a relationship with central government; and because they were mostly 25-year, build-and-run Private Finance Initiative schemes, that brought in other voices. They were very complex networks, in which the architects’ voices were quite small.
The voices of PFI businesses were louder – and so were the voices of the project managers and lawyers who’d arrive with sheaves of boxes to tick. We do take regulatory issues seriously, of course, and design buildings that are safe to use; but a lot of this was arse-covering stuff, done simply to show that you’d done it rather than for any useful purpose. We spent a huge amount of time filling in forms and writing reports about what we were going to do, when that time could have been more usefully spent actually doing it to the best possible standard.
Part of the problem with that tick-box approach is that design quality is hard to quantify, and it isn’t always easy to demonstrate the value behind architectural decisions concerning, say, quality of light, spatial organisation and experience, social spaces, quality of materials and construction, or responding to site constraints. Those things became undervalued compared to the hard numbers on costs or deadlines, and that could lead to compromises that undermined what BSF was trying to achieve.
BSF could have been much improved by stripping away some of the complexity and micromanagement, while strengthening the direct link between architects and end users. Michael Gove is right that it was a bureaucratic system with poor decision-making processes: I’ve sat in many meetings in which 20 or 30 people discussed every aspect of the project – yet nobody ever mentioned that it was about building a school for children to learn in.
Unfortunately, the way in which Gove ended BSF was completely mismanaged. They made a very quick judgement on which projects they would allow to continue, and kept getting the list wrong – so some schools were told they were for the chop, then reprieved, then axed again. After the spending review, there were more cuts to the schemes that had survived, so their quality has since been further weakened. One of the sad things about this is that architects, engineers and builders have spent years developing expertise in school projects, and now Gove is trying to draw a line under the process and start again: all that expertise will just be flushed down the pan.
Gove has been saying that BSF enriched architects and that money wasn’t getting to the frontline, but in fact we’re good at operating within constraints – including financial ones – and we work ridiculous hours for modest wages to do something that we think will improve children’s lives. The Tories’ message is that they don’t see any value in design, and in future the emphasis will be on refurbishing existing stock and modularising school construction.
There’s a role for standardisation, of course, but with every school you have to cater for two massive variables: the site and the client. And remember, we tried building on the cheap in the 1960s and ’70s, and we’ve just spent 20 years tearing most of that down again.
If the ‘free schools’ agenda really puts schools in charge it might enable the direct architect-client relationship to be restored, creating more efficient decision-making and better results; but Gove has already said that “award-winning” architects won’t be designing them. Don’t we want high-quality schools? They don’t have to be expensive ones. Day by day, our job is to find creative solutions, within constraints and with an understanding of the whole picture. And that’s what we could bring to this: we’ve been painted as part of the problem, but if we’re allowed to play a role and there’s respect for what we do, we could be part of the solution.”