By Tony Attwood C.Ed., B.A.,M.Phil., F.Inst.A.M.

Tony Attwood discovers research which will help schools radically transform teaching and learning.

Whichever way we look at it “Building the School of the Future” is a magnificent vision. It conveys images of beauty, elegance and style, and the highest imaginable qualities of the best teaching and learning in British schools.

Vast atriums with indoor trees and plants are interspersed with fountains and statues. Dedicated, deep-thinking students peer over high balconies while pupils stroll around with books under arms, intensely debating the final formula that will integrate Newtonian gravity into Plank’s Quantum Mechanics. Elsewhere GCSE students consider why, just as he had reached such fame and fortune as a poet, Shakespeare gave up on the form in order to focus on the more politically unstable world of theatre.

Outside, youngsters will be found building Titan-bound rocket ships out of Lego while track and field athletes train on landfill sites transformed into state-of-the-art sports arenas thanks to the government’s largesse.

As teachers shepherd their younger charges across the open spaces into elegant classrooms, they pass banks, crèches, young enterprise centres and IT workshops, while university professors stand besides sponsors from Microsoft watching in wonder as teenage whizzkids illustrate the means to double the speed of a PC with a sketch on the back of an envelope.

Such is the all-encompassing beauty of the dream of the School of the Future.

And yet, beneath these images lies a very awkward question indeed. For just what exactly is the effect that architecture and design have on the way children behave and learn, and on the way teachers teach?  What is it in the building that turns the ruffian into Rembrandt, a drifter into a Darwin?

The problem is that the amount of research that has been undertaken into how much impact the design and layout of a building has upon the success of teaching and learning is, not to put too fine a point on it, not much.

Of course, we can make some guesses based on everyday observation. Make the teaching room too hot or cold and the children object, work rates slow down and the health and safety officer may have words. Similar problems exist with sound levels (and no one has yet started to contemplate the question of how we might deal with complaints about classrooms under noise directive 2003/10/ec of the European Parliament).    

Then there is the issue of direct sunlight. This is certainly not a good idea as it can reflect off screens and boards, and again raise the temperature. Blinds can help, but there is something about children and blinds that does not always mix (if one allows the children to use them).

And what of such issues as the height of the room, the amount of space per child when sitting at desks, the issue of whether we should stick with the teacher at the front and the children sitting in their serried ranks, or whether we should sit in circles?  Where, one wonders, will we find the answers to all these questions?
 
 In the days of the Victorians some answers were given without research. High windows, for example, were de rigueur; they stopped the children looking out at the green and pleasant land beyond instead of paying attention. Earlier still we had buildings that allowed the high master to sit up on a dais supervising the activities of the masters who patrolled the hall ensuring absolute discipline and attention to the task in hand. Such buildings were dictated by the way we wanted to teach. In some schools indeed design was even simpler – in effect designing a school was a bit like designing a prison – you wanted order and you wanted to be able to see the inmates at all times. So that’s what you built.

But what of the 21st century? What buildings really will produce better teaching and learning? And what about better discipline, although not at the expense of self-expression and creativity? We want the children to listen and learn, but we also want them to come up with new ideas. We want to produce musicians, scientists, booksellers, tele-sales operators, computer programmers and, not least, some gold medal winners at the London Olympics.

So what buildings do we need?  Building Schools for the Future is the biggest single government investment in improving school buildings for over 50 years. The aim is to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England over a 10-15 year period. The government speaks of issues such as providing buildings which inspire and motivate those that learn and work within them and contribute to the communities they serve.

But how?

Ask a teacher what makes a better school and you might find mention of better lit corridors, carpeted classrooms, proper signage and more computers. Ask an administrator and you will get talk of automated school registration and filtered incoming email systems.

But is this all there is?

Such details are helpful but they are not necessarily the steps that lead us towards schools of the future producing stunningly better results. Talk of adaptability and flexibility (which is all-pervasive within government documents on the subject) helps to ensure that the design might be able to cope with as many variations as possible in the future.

But where is the detail? 

In fact it was discovered no less than five years ago in a large study in California that there was indeed a direct link between the way a classroom is designed and the way students and children perform in the classroom.

The possibility of there being a previously unconsidered factor influencing what was perceived as declining pupil achievement arose with the report “Daylighting in schools” which was first published in California. It suggested for the first time that there was a significant correlation between how light was generated and the ways pupils performed in class. Quite amazingly the report found that in sky-lit bright rooms learning rates were 27% faster than in comparable schools that used only fluorescent lighting.

This certainly tied in with the awareness of many teachers that some lessons simply do work better in some classrooms rather than in others.

The task of finding out why this is so, and what can be done about it, has been taken up by Laura Merton at Conport Structures – manufacturers of pre-fabricated buildings for educational use in over 40 countries.

As Laura Merton said, “For many years we have been supplying pre-fabricated buildings which are designed to flood the rooms with glare-free natural light from above. We found that this approach excited many educational establishments. Among the first to act in the UK were art colleges who quickly appreciated the benefits of our approach.

“However when we were speaking with students and tutors in the art colleges we began to realize that our NorthlightTM Studios not only gave glare-free natural light, which made their work easier to undertake – it also gave an ambiance that affected the quality of the student’s work.

“We are now developing the view, building on the California report, that pupils’ and students’ ability to focus and concentrate is greatly affected by the lighting to which they are exposed during the day.                                     

“NorthlightTM studios can be constructed with parapet walls of any material to suit local planning requirements,” said Laura Merton “and, because we can supply them in a pre-fabricated form, construction times are much lower than for conventional buildings, as are costs.”

Chelsea School of Art and Design and more recently the Arts Institute, Bournemouth have both adopted this style of building in the UK, and Conport Structures are now seeking schools and local authorities that are interested in erecting classrooms using this technique as part of the Schools of the Future campaign. In the absence of any other clear evidence as to what difference school buildings can make to behaviour and teaching and learning, schools are now turning to this radical approach to school architecture as the way of the future. They do now have at least one model on which to build.