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.
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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.Was it the case that those who had a birds eye view of the problem were also utterly dependent upon Partnerships For Schools for the ongoing success of their project? Is it possible to manage a scheme such as this in a transparent and accountable way when a QUANGO of any description is in a monopolistic position?
A review such as this appears to take all bets off the table – and this can only be a good thing. Can we bring these projects closer to local management? In preparing the ground for Free Schools, the bigger prize, surely, is that the processes needed to refurbish a school will need to be easier to apply.
How far did the sheer complexity of processes serve to effectively centralise decisions? Do complex benchmarking schemes need to be replaced by much more useable standards that everyone can understand – standards that define what a decent school is? Indeed, is this one of the great opportunities offered by the concept of the post bureaucratic age?
We hope to hear your views here in the comments section, in our LinkedIn forum and at a number of events that we’re organising to help focus everyone’s thinking in response to this review.
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Designing schools is a process of achieving educational outcomes, by the school community, where the building is a functional wrapper and symbolic place of belonging.
Positive aspect of deregulation/competition (Academies&Free Schools) could be innovation, choice, improvement through competition and coopetition between schools.
Potential negative = impact on children in free-market-failure schools, impact on vulnerable children and those whose choices are limited.
If the process&programme can be designed to mitigate these negatives, the innovation will be very welcome.
Let’s also not lose the wealth of expertise accumulated via BSF, flawed though it was.
Also if Planning risk can be removed we’d save a lot of money.