Again, a month is a very long time in the current climate of educational revolution.
Click on this image to go to the 2010 Awards booklet
Looking back, it’s very hard to believe that it was less than a month ago that Michael Gove read the last rites over the BSF programme and announced the review chaired by Sebastian James.
The interim report is due in September and the final one is published in December.
Since then, we’ve already organised a number of member meetings – one in Manchester and the other in London – with over eighty people attending. These were intended to flush out questions and response and we are putting our finishing touches to now. We’ve been circulating templates that existing projects can use to feed in case studies.As Pascale Scheurer of Surface To Air Architects put it in our Centre for School Design comment thread…
“…[a] positive aspect of deregulation/competition (Academies & Free Schools) could be innovation, choice, improvement through competition and co-opetition 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.”
The whole Free School programme has continued to grab headlines, and one of the immoveable objects that they are confronting has been the difficulty in finding suitable sites.
Much of the procurement and guidance that has been available in recent years has –as our submission to the James Review will restate – been inflexible, monolithic and lacking in creativity.
Academies and free schools need a different kind of help, and for this reason, we’ve established the Academies and Free Schools Advisory Service. This is intended to gather the combined and accumulated experience of people who have worked on hundreds of school rebuild, refurb and reuse projects and put it at the disposal of these new providers to deliver next-generation schools.
We’ve continued to emphasise the role that school environments play in education and we’ve been a bit worried by those some expressing the view that school environments have little impact on the quality of education on offer. They do.
And lastly, it’s a month since the BCSE awards, but let’s not forget that there are some great projects out there that act as an example to us all on what is possible. Have a look at the awards booklet – it’s now online here.
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