Monday’s passing of the Academies Bill in parliament heralded a radical change in the landscape of education in a way not seen for 20 years. As a flagship coalition policy, Academies and Free schools will aim to shift and outperform the old way of delivering education.
There are also a number of new elements in this changing schools system that require different solutions: new providers – from the UK and abroad who will run and manage schools; new teachers – in the form of the recent graduates of the TeachFirst programme and experienced leaders looking for new challenges; new roles and responsibilities – for parents, teachers and charitable groups running Free Schools; and new systems – with less local authority control, fewer restrictions on curriculum and direct accountability to the Minister. Continue reading →
We must remember amidst all of the challenges and difficulties presented by the last 2 weeks and the cancellation of the BSF programme that teachers, local authorities, architects, contractors and suppliers have been and are still building some world class school buildings and learning environments. So with an unashamed focus on the positive – here are details and pictures of all of the BCSE Industry Award 2010 Winners. Lets celebrate some of the best of Britain’s schools – delivered despite some of the worst of Britain’s procurement processes.
The more we’ve looked at the review looking at the overhaul of England’s school building programmes led by Sebastian James, the more we’re seeing opportunities to rationalise what had become a cumbersome and inefficient means of improving the standards of school stock.
Pic: Click for credit
Over the next few weeks, we’re hoping to use The Centre for School Design site to build a conversation between people who work in local government and a handful of expert guest-bloggers before we finalise our own response to this review.
One of the key questions for us is this: Are other countries building things cheaper and better than us? When Michael Gove observed that Hong Kong International Airport had gone from soup-to-nuts in less time than it took some BSF rebuilding projects, he surely had a point about the waste, delays and ineffectual procurement methods that were used?
Looking at the terms of reference (MS Word Doc), we’d be very interested to see how procurement, in particular, is reviewed. We were only ever able to get half-answers from Partnership for Schools on why this process needed so many inflexible rules and gatekeepers. We’d also be interested to find out why so few people were prepared to speak up in the face of such obvious delay and poor management. Continue reading →
Amidst the multitude of stories about Building Schools for the Future in the past few weeks, there has been little up to date research quoted about the impact of school environments – and a lot of incredibly woeful debates and uninformed accounts saying “do school buildings matter?”.
Our most recent survey of over 500 teachers shows that school environments have a positive impact on pupil behaviour, teachers ability to teach effectively in the classroom and their well being. It follows a similar landmark survey done in 2008 ‘Just another brick in the wall’ which showed the need for school capital programmes to involve teachers and create more flexible environments. Continue reading →
The news has been full of stories about Free Schools recently. We have seen stories that concentrate on parent power and the freedom to set their own curriculum, and in contrast we have seen stories concentrating on how shops such as Woolworths and other buildings will be converted to house these schools.
But what has been missing is how these relate to each other.
For the last few years the BCSE have run study tours to Sweden and had conversations with architect, Kenneth Gardestad, from Kunskappskolan about the possibilities of the power of the old informing the new. An old submarine factory as a school? An old light bulb factory? These are successful industrial production spaces that have been transformed into learning spaces. Continue reading →
It’s been a busy month in the world of school design. Amid the financial uncertainty, a number of key annual industry events took place during the month, including the BCSE Industry Awards – a great evening with a range of inspirational speakers. You can see a full list of the winners here and we’ll be featuring specific projects in the coming months in a bit more detail on the site.
National School Environments Week (18 – 25 June) started with an eclectic mix of events, seminars and networking opportunities – from a fantastic House of Commons launch event with speakers including the outgoing chair of the education select committee Barry Sheerman MP and Micael Sammon. To a seminar on the ‘Architecture of the Mind’ – looking at design issues for special educational needs, health and well being and mental health with great inputs from Georgia Burt and Martha McSweeney from Nightingale Associates - the latter who had worked on projects as diverse as secure units in Northern Ireland and Broadmoor! We also ran a UK-Dutch school design symposium at the Dutch Embassy which was a sprint like event through innovative school design ideas from the Netherlands from 6 leading architect firms – more on that to follow.
Whilst we were still awaiting news on what budgetary cuts we could expect from the new government (our response to the emegency budget is here) we turned our attention to school refurbishment. On the 21st June, we teamed up with Scott Brownrigg and Davis Langdon to publish our ‘Rethinking Schools Capital Investment – the New 3Rs? Refresh, Refurb, Reuse?’ report in full on the Centre for School Design website. Continue reading →
We’re still slightly reeling from the speech given by Steve Chalke tonight at the BCSE Industry Awards.
"If you're only in this business to put up buildings, you're in the wrong business."
We knew he was worth hearing – we wouldn’t have asked him to speak otherwise – but if we’d anticipated just how powerful his message was going to be … well, you’d be watching a YouTube of it instead of getting a few remembered quotes from me.
It was a tour de force that resulted in ‘our host for the evening – Kim Catcheside – grabbing the microphone and giving us a very good rendition of ‘Sweet Chariot’!
Drawing on his experience growing up in South London before founding the Oasis Trust, Steve made the point that teachers often say ‘have a good weekend’ to some of the kids they work with in the knowledge that the weekend isn’t as good or inspiring as the time that they spend in a school that is designed and managed by committed people. Continue reading →
Money may be tight right now, but there is a huge amount that we can learn from the decisions that were made over the past decade of investment in school building capital project. In preparing for the BCSE 2010 Industry Awards tomorrow night, I was reviewing some of the 2009 winners to see how they compare.
I often hold Knowsley’s approach up as one of the best examples of a local authority responding directly to the nature of learning in the 21st century.
Yesterday’s launch event of our new resource ‘The New 3Rs’ threw up some really interesting observations from the presenters about the new landscape we are working within – and some radical options for the future of schools and school design.
Interestingly many of these had their roots in the history of schooling and identify a need to learn the lessons of the past to be able to make sense of the present more challenging climate and to succeed in the future. Presentations from the event are available here and I’ve summarised the key discussions below. Continue reading →
Monday’s passing of the Academies Bill in parliament heralded a radical change in the landscape of education in a way not seen for 20 years. As a flagship coalition policy, Academies and Free schools will aim to shift and outperform the old way of delivering education.
