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 [...]
Posts under ‘BCSE / C4SD activities’
The Best of Britain’s Schools
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 [...]
Responding to the James review
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. Over the next few weeks, we’re hoping to use The Centre for School [...]
Survey shows school environment impacts on behaviour
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 [...]
Free schools – connecting the dots
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 [...]
What you may have missed in June?
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 [...]
BCSE Industry Award Winners 2010
We’re still slightly reeling from the speech given by Steve Chalke tonight at the BCSE Industry Awards. 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 [...]
Buildings that embrace the nature of learning in the 21st century
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 [...]
Remodelling education – key lessons from history
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 [...]
The New 3 Rs – refresh, refurb & reusing schools
We’ve just published a report entitled ‘Rethinking schools capital investment: the new 3Rs? – Refresh, refurb, reuse. We’re loading the whole thing up as a permanent section to this site and you can download it here (pdf). It has been produced in conjunction with Scott Brownrigg and Davis Langdon. The New 3Rs – refresh, refurbishment [...]
