Following our call for ideas – I am posting up some great case studies and discussions we had about designing special schools. As a major issue for the new government, special schools are very much here to stay – but their design and work is not always given the same profile and visibility way as [...]
Posts under ‘Architecture’
Remodelling education spaces
For obvious reasons, we’ve been getting a lot of interest around the question of school refurbishment and remodelling in recent weeks. It’s an area that we’ve covered in a number of ways over the past year or so. Our major remodelling conference in March 2009 featured some of the best case studies and presentations available in England. [...]
Creating autism friendly environments
Following our call for ideas on designing special schools, I was invited to visit the Treehouse School – which is part of the Pears National Centre for Autism Education and the Treehouse charity. Not only is it a truly inspirational building but also a beacon of good practice in designing autism friendly environments. Given the [...]
Call for ideas: Designing special schools
The summer term starts with our first ‘Call for Ideas’ – which is our way of gathering and sharing best practice in key areas of education / design policy and practice. The design of special schools and inclusive learning environments is a subject very close to our heart and will be a focus in some [...]
Why school environments matter
As part of our launch of our School Environments Charter, we asked an ICT teacher from Hamble College in Southampton (who Ty met by chance at an SSAT event) to get his Digital Leader students to do a short poem and video about why they thought school environments matter. As you can see from the [...]
Reshaping our learning landscape
We are really pleased to be working with Croydon and Kingston Council and their team (the fantastic Jo Twine and Darren Atkinson) on a series of provocation papers as part of their Building Schools for the Future programme. One of the papers is already on the DesignShare website and is written by Prakash Nair and [...]
Wales 21st Century Schools programme
I was invited to be part of a panel discussion at yesterday’s launch of the Welsh Assembly’s school capital programme. The 21st Century schools programme is a major collaboration between government, the WLGA and local authorities and although the budget has not been set it could be as much as £2bn. The introduction to the [...]
A-Z of school design – A is for…
Our A-Z Sketchbook of School Design is a great resource for everyone working in the field – so we are giving it away for free. With some sponsorship, we will produce a new version at the end of the year. But in the meantime we will post up new sections every week. So first up [...]
BECTA X to Nick Gibb – social media in action
I had a great chat with Katz Kieley – the mastermind of a fantastic programme of events in the digital world called B-tween. She has been asked by BECTA to set up a collaborative event at the end of March called BECTA X. My chat with her is now a blog on their site
Gove 1 Balls 0 – A Battle of Ideas
The Conservative Party will make education its top campaign message this week. The two main parties have been engaged in ‘political mirroring’ for months; it’s now time for political attack. I met Michael Gove MP, again at the weekend in Brighton at their spring policy forum. This man is in the right place at the [...]
