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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1150-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Monday 3 July 2006 MR DAVID KESTER, MS HILARY COTTAM and MR JOHN SORRELL MR TY GODDARD and MR RICHARD SIMMONS Evidence heard in Public Questions 114-226
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 3 July 2006 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Mr David Chaytor Paul Holmes Helen Jones Mr Gordon Marsden Stephen Williams Mr Rob Wilson ________________ Insert A
Memorandum submitted by The Sorrell Foundation Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr David Kester, Chief Executive, Ms Hilary Cottam, Head of RED team, Design Council and Mr John Sorrell, Sorrell Foundation, gave evidence. Q114 Chairman: May I welcome John Sorrell, Hilary Cottam and David Kester to our proceedings? We are very pleased that such an expert and distinguished group of witnesses has been able to come at relatively short notice. I am afraid I have to admit, as Chairman of the Committee, that I know all three of them very well indeed; we have been interested in design together in certain projects for a long time. That does not mean to say my questioning will be anything less robust. Would any of you like to say a few words to open up this evidence session? We usually give witnesses a chance to say a few words to open up. This is an important inquiry for us: £45 billion of taxpayers' money. It is more money than has ever been spent on schools, on their construction and reconstruction and if we do not get this right, the legacy is going to be with us a very long time. We still have the legacy of schools that were beautifully designed to leak and we still have water features in many of those schools in the winter months with buckets that you have to walk around. That is the truth of it: we have to get this design right. In a new era we want not only wonderfully designed buildings, but we want them fit for the kind of teaching which will go into them in the 21st century. Given this stark warning we have had about global warning we also want them to be schools which have a smaller, not a larger, carbon footprint. We are after a lot of things in terms of this inquiry. How do you think we can best add value to this inquiry? Mr Sorrell: First of all may I agree with you entirely: this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and none of us will ever see it again, absolutely none of us. We have to grasp it and we have to grasp it now. The key things which you will probably hear me talking about today are the need to involve pupils in everything that is happening because they are the consumers of education and, like all consumers everywhere, they are very interested in the product that is provided to them and they have very strong views about it; they also have the kinds of insights that absolutely nobody else has because nobody else is sitting where they are sitting. That is an absolutely central and vital point. I know you want to get on with questions, so perhaps I should allow you to do that. Q115 Chairman: Hilary, I was very rude. You helped us with the prison education inquiry and I forgot to mention that, but in terms of today's perspective, where do you think we can add value? Ms Cottam: I also welcome what you said as an opening statement. For me the question is whether this is a capital programme or a learning-led programme. It is a really big question about what the learning vision is, whether it is in place at a macro national level and whether it is in place at a school level and what we can we do to make sure that we are not still refurbishing schools in a learning vacuum? Given how much has changed in the wider society and what we understand now about learning, how can we really begin to make sure that this capital programme is meshed in and delivers quality for learning? Mr Kester: I should also like to thank you for inviting us and agree with both of my colleagues here; we come with very similar perspectives on this. I should simply like to add that this building schools programme is a huge opportunity. The likelihood is that we are likely to get right a lot of hygiene factors around refurbishment and buildings. We are good at big capital projects in the UK. The only question really is whether it will actually satisfy a vision for learning or whether we just end up with beautiful buildings up and down the country or whether we end up with great schools that will see us well into the future. Probably the answer is that there may be some things that we could do now. There are some real opportunities coming out of the work that we are seeing from Design for Schools, from CABE, from the Design Council as well, particularly around some of the early interventions which can be made within schools to secure the sort of vision, both of the school at a local community level, perhaps of the region locally and also nationally so that we all have a very clear understanding of what it is that we are trying to achieve for education. Q116 Chairman: Why are we bothering to do this? Why do we not just spend the money on the top six or seven things that children you talk to, students that you talk to prioritise? I have a list here but they always talk about the quality of the refectory, the quality of the lavatories and so on. Why do we not just spend a little bit of money refurbishing those essentials that the students prioritise and spend the rest of the money on IT equipment or fold-away buildings, Legoland buildings? Why bother having permanent structures which are built at all in a conventional sense? Mr Sorrell: As I understand it, what will happen is that there will be many new schools but quite a large part of the money will go on refurbishment as the programme develops. It will be a mixture of the two things. The reason why we have to address the school building stock is that so much of it really is in such terrible disrepair. In most cases it would be like putting an Elastoplast on a major wound and it will last for a little while but it will not last long enough. It is absolutely the right time to address the big issue, to grasp the metal and to build some significant new schools as well as refurbish where it is appropriate to do so. It is the appropriateness that is important. Some of the schools that I see around the country do need to be knocked down and we need to start again. Others can be refurbished sensitively and with great expertise. The issues that you mentioned - there are 12 and we call them common issues - are the issues that we find again and again and again in working with over 100 schools and are the 12 common issues that the kids identify as being important to them. We can give the list to you in writing, but they are things like toilets, which the children want to be hygienic and not places where they can be bullied, they want a civilised lunchtime, they do not want to be herded like cattle, 1,400 children from one side of the room to the other in an hour, they want to be able to talk to their friends just like we all do at lunchtime. When they go outside, as they have to do as we all know, they do not want to be rained on, so they want covered outdoor space, which is incredibly important to them. They want reception areas so that when their parents come along or their carers, they feel they are being welcomed properly into the school. They want their school to have a good reputation and identity. The children we speak to again and again are very proud of their schools and they do want the school to be seen as a good school in the community and they do want differentiation. They do not want to have the same as the school down the road or the school round the corner; they want their school to be special and different for them and their peers. Q117 Chairman: We hear about the history of Nobel laureates. It does not matter much whether they work in a leaky building. A lot of people want their children to go to some of the highest-profiles and research-rich universities in the country and you know they are 14th century buildings which are mouldering away with ivy growing all over them. They are not going for the modern Legoland or even the kind of 1960s design of the new generation of universities. Why are you saying that there is a relationship between the quality of design of a building and the quality of education? Mr Sorrell: Because great design inspires you. If we create school buildings which are brilliantly functional, of course they have to serve their purpose and they have to be fit for purpose. If they are built well so they are going to last a long time and be easy to maintain, we shall obviously save money in the long term. That is absolutely great, but for me that is just a ticket to the game. We have to build buildings which are inspirational and create the kind of learning environments which our children can grow up in and yes, I know that hardship is something that we can accept, but I do not see why they should not have the same kind of toilets that you have down corridor here, which are very good quality indeed and which are very much better than the ones that MPs have to use in the House of Commons. It is absolutely crystal clear that if you give children brilliantly inspirational learning environments, they will develop much better. Q118 Chairman: Hilary, we are very used to people coming in here and trying to sell us a product. Sometimes it is because they run a small business and are selling synthetic phonics or whatever, sometimes other products. However, the three of you are in the design sector, are you not? You are selling us design so you would tell us design was worth £45 billion of new taxpayers' money would you not? Is there really a relationship between good design and the outcomes? Ms Cottam: I should say that learning is worth £45 billion of taxpayers' money because, to go back to your previous question, it might be that a Nobel prize winner will always surface at any school but what is really important socially and economically for this country is that learning is very wide and that every child is stimulated to learn, that we do not have problems with truancy, which we have seen in our work is directly related to the quality of the loos, that we do have environments which are really inspirational and fantastic to learn in. That is what you are trying to buy with your £45 billion and, if you like, design is the problem-solving process that will ensure that that investment that you are making delivers learning for this country. What we are arguing for is not in some industry way that our mates could have a job and do this, but really for a wider process, which does not have to be facilitated by designers all the time, but is a kind of very simple problem-solving process which can establish a learning vision in every school, get all the pupils harnessed around it, the teachers, the wider community and can actually make sure that that investment delivers for that community and for the nation. That is what is important. Q119 Chairman: Would you agree with that David? You are the Design Council; your job depends on persuading people that design is critical. Mr Kester: One way to look at it is from the positive, the other way to look at it is from the negative which is what the impact is of having poor learning environments, leaky roofs, poor light, poor acoustics and so forth. Actually a lot of academic evidence has been collected and will be submitted to you later in the year which really demonstrates that learning is impacted severely if you do not have a reasonably good environment. To put it back on the positive, absolutely, if we have a very coherent vision for what we are looking for, if a teacher actually knows how to get the most out of the design process, knows the problem that they are trying to solve, then they will get a good solution at the end. Half the problem here that we have when working on a £45 million programme is that this is the first big capital project that most of the clients have ever run and it may be the only one they are going to run at this level. They are going to oversee perhaps a £20 million new school build and are they a design savvy client? Are they going to get the most out of that process? Are they going to understand the art of the possible? That is a big question. It is very difficult to do that and what you really need to do is make sure that all of those people involved at the decision-making end of the tree know how to manage that process very smartly and know what is possible, get the most out of it and know the questions to ask. Q120 Chairman: Can we hit all the buttons in terms of good design? Can we have good design that is aesthetically pleasing, good design which stimulates good learning and sustainable design which cuts down the carbon footprint on the planet? Are they compatible? Mr Sorrell: Yes, absolutely. If it is going to be good design, it needs to address all those things. I really do think it is important to make the point that good design is design that performs its function brilliantly, but in this case means well-built buildings which also are going to inspire not just the children but also the teachers, the local community who may well use the school. In many cases now we are going to find schools which are going to be available for community use, much longer hours of use for the building. Good design in the end is about form and function; it has to be all those things if it is going to be good. In fact I would go further than that: good is not good enough. It should be excellent because this is for our children, it is for the future of the country. Mediocre is not good enough. Even good is not good enough, it has to be absolutely excellent and there is no reason why it should not be because we have the designers in this country, some of the best architects in the world, we have the best designers of products and schools need things like storage systems designed brilliantly, clothing designed, uniforms and so on. There is absolutely no reason why this should not be very, very good indeed. Chairman: Let us draw down a bit more on pupil involvement and transformation. Q121 Mr Wilson: Mr Sorrell, when the Chairman asked you whether buildings mattered, your reply was that great design inspires you. Where is the evidence for that? Where is your evidence base for making that assertion? Mr Sorrell: Forty years' experience of working in the world of design and seeing how it affects companies, people in the public sector, individuals and talking to literally thousands of children over the last six years. They know how much design influences them. For example, they will talk about how colour in their school affects their mood; if you get the colours wrong, you can actually affect their mood in school. They know absolutely how a building, which when you approach it has something exciting about it and which is visually pleasing, is going to make them feel better about going inside it. There is evidence in other areas as well, but in terms of schools, if you talk to the children you will find out how inspirational design is to them. Q122 Mr Wilson: With the greatest of respect, that is very anecdotal and we are talking about spending £45 billion of public money. Where is the evidence on which you can base the spending of that sum of money? Mr Sorrell: I cannot put any hard facts or statistical evidence on the table in front of you, but a very, very tiny amount of money is spent on design out of the programme; one per cent of the life costs, absolutely tiny, miniscule. If I put it another way, we could all get up in the morning and say we are going to go out and design these schools really badly, we are going to design schools which are basically not going to function very well, the design is not going to work for the build, so they will fall down fairly quickly and when people walk towards them they feel gloom and despair because they will look so absolutely appalling. We are not going to do that. What we are actually going to do is our very best to make them inspirational because we absolutely know, even though I cannot put statistical evidence in front of you, that they will inspire and they will bring much better results. Q123 Mr Wilson: You mentioned some companies which had been inspired by the buildings they were in. Can you just give me one or two examples? Mr Sorrell: If you look at companies like Apple, you do not have to go too far from here to see Apple spending money on design and designing things well. Everything is designed anyway. Someone decides what it is going to be like; that is design. The question is whether you want good design or whether you want mediocre or poor design because in the end someone makes the decisions. Every single thing in this room is designed by somebody. Somebody has made those decisions and the same applies to schools or office blocks or houses or anything else. With someone like Apple, if you go and look at the Apple store in the middle of London or look at the one in New York, you will see that they use design not just for their products, because they believe that by designing their products better they will obviously make more money, they also do exactly the same with their buildings because they want those buildings not just to function well, but to inspire their consumers. There is no difference if the consumer happens to be a child and it is public money being spent rather than the companies, because the profit which we shall make is in the future of this country through those children being much better citizens, knowing more and being able to help the country more in the future. Mr Kester: I should like to come in with two points there. One is the actual impact evidence around design and the value of design and there is a mass of very good impact evidence on the value of design. Q124 Chairman: In schools? Mr Kester: Just generally right across public and private sector and schools are no different from hospitals, they are no different from businesses. If you apply design effectively to a problem, you can get good results. You can look at a tracking survey, which was done on FTSE 100 companies in fact, which shows that over a ten-year period companies which used design effectively and strategically performed 200 per cent above the market average. However, the point I want to make is that actually design is not a panacea. I should go back to the issue of what the problem is that you want to solve. Actually it is not about throwing design at it, this is not a £45 billion design project, this is a £45 billion refurbishment and build programme of schools. The question is what you want out of it and what you are asking of design. If you know what you are asking, you might get some good solutions. If I may give an example, there is a very, very good example in one of the schools that we cite, in San Diego, where the local community was looking to foster a sense of self-determination amongst its pupils, it was looking to maximise pupil involvement and it was also looking at the issue of sustainability in schools. What was their answer? Their answer was to convert a Navy warehouse, not a new-build school. They focused totally on the internal environment of that school and when they looked to the best in office design, the best practices in terms of hot-desking, all sorts of new techniques that we all know and we share in our daily world if we walk around business, they took that in to that school environment and they have had phenomenal results and attainment. It is really about what you are trying to achieve and then you can ask the designers to come in and work to that brief. Ms Cottam: I just want to say that we have had a relatively short start on this programme so there are not a lot of results yet. SchoolWorks have developed quite a good ex-post evaluation which I imagine they will talk about, but I started SchoolWorks in the first school we did, Kingsdale, five years ago and that has been evaluated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. They have looked at what has been the educational benefit, not just of the design spend on the school but really critically to the design process that got them to that good design. They have shown that that has added educational value; Kingsdale was officially a failing school and is now one of Britain's top 20 most improved schools still with a very difficult catchment. So there is some concrete evidence, but we are only just beginning to get it out because we are only just beginning to measure this relatively new programme. Q125 Mr Wilson: Did you involve children in the design of that school? Ms Cottam: Yes. What we did was to have a programme where we worked with the children who were at the school, their parents, the staff, the senior management team and the dinner ladies, everybody in the school, the surrounding community who did not have their children at the school were looking at that as well. We redesigned - this is critical - the school building, the management system, the system of pastoral care and the curriculum because what is critical is that the design process makes sure that all those things are working together and out of that has been a very strong educational outcome which you cannot ever say was just because of the design spend; though obviously it is in part related to that. There was an independent PriceWaterhouseCoopers' evaluation which showed learning benefit to that investment. Q126 Mr Wilson: John, you talked earlier about common issues children got involved in, in particular you said they did not like being herded like cattle into the dinner queues and they wanted covered space when they went out so that is something you would like to see designed into schools. Where do we stop this pandering to young people in schools? Where do we draw the line? Do we start offering them manicures when they ask for them? Mr Sorrell: It is a thought, is it not? I do not think so. Q127 Mr Wilson: How far are you prepared to go? Mr Sorrell: I should just ask the children. What you will find, if you do ask them, is that they are incredibly pragmatic and people who talk to us about Joinedupdesignforschools say "Surely when you ask kids what they would like to improve in their schools they all talk about putting in coca-cola machines?". They do not. What they talk about are really pragmatic things like toilets which are hygienic and where they do not get bullied, a civilised lunchtime, things like social spaces which are not in the corridor in the corner or on the steps at the backdoor but which are actually designed as part of the school life. My answer really is the answer the children would give you, which is that they are pragmatic about what they want. They actually do not ask for that much and they certainly do not ask for any more than anyone in this room would expect in their working environment. You do not have to go as far as manicures, but you do have to think about what school life is like for children and listen very hard to what they say about it because their perspective is completely different. I shall give you an example. Whereas an architect will look at open plan and worry about things like acoustic separation and perhaps noise being a problem, a child might look at open plan and see it as a way they are not going to get bullied because the teacher can see lots of people and they are not going to get beaten up. Looking at it from the children's point of view is very important and they will not ask you for those kinds of things. Q128 Mr Wilson: Does it matter what age the child is? If it is a new school, it could be a five-year-old as much as a 16-year-old? Mr Sorrell: Yes. We work with children from the age of four to 18 and we really have not found any difference in their approach except of course the young ones cannot write briefs, so they do displays or they put on a play and perform it, which is very unusual for an architect. In 30 years in business, no-one ever wrote a play and performed a brief for me, but the children do this and they really can get their points across. Even the youngest ones have very strong feelings about the environment they are in and they know how much it affects them. Q129 Mr Wilson: How likely is it that a school, in a sense built by five- to 18-year-olds, is going to stand the test of time? What children think is the thing to do today, in 10 or 20 years' time may be completely different. How will these schools stand the test of time? Mr Sorrell: They are not designing it. What they are is a part of the client stakeholder group and on the Building Schools for the Future programme there are lots of people on the client side. Q130 Mr Wilson: But you are saying they are influential in the decisions and the design. Mr Sorrell: They should be; I am not saying they are at the moment. That is one of the things I am asking for because they are not, at the moment, as properly involved as I believe they should be and the problem comes when people only pay lip service to consulting the pupils. Very often what happens is the school is designed basically and then the kids are brought together for an hour, they are shown the designs of the focus group and at the end of it boxes are ticked. What I am calling for is a much, much deeper involvement of pupils in the overall client stakeholder group, and it is a big group because you have head teachers, teachers, parents, governors, local community, the LEAs. It is a very, very big stakeholder group on the client side. The ones I plead for are the children because they are the ones who are likely to be left out of the discussion. It is making a big mistake if we do not involve them properly. Of course they are not designing the schools, what they are doing is helping to inform the people who are designing them and that is the whole point. If you create a great vision, a great brief and you have a great designer working with that great brief then you have a good chance of getting a good result. Mr Kester: I just want to build on what John was saying because it is so right and so important and in design this is often referred to as the user insight. Every single major business that uses design in the world is looking to understand its user, so that it can actually deliver to the real deep needs that the user has. In this context obviously the pupils are not the only customer and stakeholder; teachers are, the local community is, we as a society are because we are actually looking to have high-attaining young people coming through our schools. Design has all sorts of good and clever techniques to get those insights out. You are not necessarily asking what children want and just giving it to them: you are trying to find out what we need. Designers are very, very good at that and a lot of the sort of work that Hilary has been running, through our work not only with schools but also in areas of health and other areas, has actually been to bring some of those insights to the fore as early as possible, so that those can shape your idea of what a school can be and bring those possibilities to the table. Q131 Mr Wilson: I think you would agree that most businesses do not design the buildings that they work from and there is probably not one employee that I could identify or you could identify that had any involvement in designing their place of work, yet they still do a fantastic job. Mr Kester: Actually I dispute that strongly. I might say that of the external fascia of a building, and of course this place is a very good example of a building in which a lot of people had a say both externally and internally, but certainly in a well-run organisation you would be involving and consulting and understanding the needs that you have of your internal workforce when you are constantly revising and redesigning your internal environment to maximise productivity. You would be looking at the adjacencies of different work teams. You would be looking at light, you would be looking at the sort of workspaces that you need, the number of meeting rooms you need, a whole array of different issues are brought to bear and any sensible business is consulting and working with its internal team on a regular basis, particularly at times when it is actually refurbishing or changing or moving and when it does not, we all see the terrible things we complain about when we work in places which did not consult, did not understand and it all goes terribly pear-shaped. Q132 Paul Holmes: The last great wave of school building was the 1960s and to save cost and to spread the money around at that time a lot of them were built on the clasp system where you have prefabricated panels bolted together, some of the new universities like York at the time, and they sat there for the next 40 years as fairly brutalist examples of 1960s architecture, but they got more bang for their buck by doing it that way. Are we getting the right balance, if we spend money in this second wave of school building on design rather than on building more new schools for example? Ms Cottam: May I answer that question? There is a fallacy that good design somehow costs more. If we take architecture, architects take a percentage of the costs. Whether you have a good architect or a bad architect, it is going to cost you the same amount of money so the question is: is your process delivering good architecture? Similarly with the kind of process that we have been working with at the Design Council, the design process is about trying to link what is a learning vision, trying to make sure that that investment that you are going to make anywhere in a building delivers learning outcomes. What we have seen internationally is that if you spend the time and the money upfront getting that brief right and getting that learning vision right, then the actual school building itself is cheaper. Then the whole procurement, like any project, goes very smoothly because everybody knows what is wanted and what they are signed up to at the beginning and you deliver something better for learning and a cheaper process at the final end. It is not like an add-on, it is in there anyway: it is just whether it is being well done or not. Mr Sorrell: You are asking a really important question because there is an attitude in this country about design which always queries and for my entire career of 40 years in the world of design I have spent a lot of time trying to justify why good design is important. I know that the man behind me, Richard Simmons, will talk when he gives evidence about a publication CABE have just produced and a campaign they are running which is called The Cost of Bad Design. What I should like to do is talk about the cost of bad design and I do not just mean cost in terms of money, because if you design something badly then you will probably end up paying a great deal more in the long run to look after it and maintain it, than you would if you designed it well, but also the cost on people's lives and the impact on them. If you really design things badly, then you can really mess people's lives up. If you think about houses, hospitals, schools, all the things in the public sector which are so important, if they are designed badly, they can really impact on people's welfare. I agree entirely with what Hilary said, but we ought to turn the question round sometimes and say "Just how much does bad design cost us in this country?". We certainly cannot afford to have bad designs in our schools' programme. Mr Kester: The corollary to that is that there is a real risk that good design and good design process will not get integrated into the Building Schools for the Future programme. That is really the risk: will we actually be able to integrate the best that we know of design? In the end this building programme is happening, it is rolling out, it has a timetable against it, there are some risks in the system and everybody is going to watch out that those risks do not end up messing the whole system up. There is a real possibility that we shall not get the innovation and creativity that we really want. If we want to have great schools that are fit not just for the next ten years, but 50 or 100 years - and of course our Victorian schools have lasted over 100 years - then what are we actually going to do now that is going to ensure that the sort of schools that we creating are going to endure and support us in the long term? That means some really smart, clever thinking upfront and once the ball is rolling and the procurement exercise has started, it is going to be too late, which is where we have been advocating early design processes. Q133 Paul Holmes: I agree with much of what you have said, but just to play devil's advocate again, I can think of schools across Derbyshire that I worked in as a teacher and visited and I can think of a wave of 1920s schools that were built to the same blueprint by the same architect in Ilkeston and in Buxton and in Chesterfield, all over Derbyshire. You just walk in and it is absolutely identical to the ones you have been in before. Then you have the 1960s wave, which are much more badly designed but again were absolutely identical. Surely if you build 500 schools over the next few years, all with different design teams and architects, that has to use up more money less efficiently than if you have a team of architects who come up with one good design and all schools are built to the same blueprint. Mr Sorrell: The first point to make is that different parts of the country, as we all know, have their own special characteristics and it would be an absolute tragedy if we rolled out the blueprint of one standard design which everybody uses. Chairman: Tesco's do it, why should we not? Q134 Paul Holmes: That is why we should not. Mr Sorrell: Absolutely. Perhaps I should not go any further on that one. First of all, there is absolutely no point in doing it because we do not have to do it that way and if we can get individuality in different schools in different places, then not only would it be appropriate for the environment, but it would also be appropriate for the children and the teachers who are there. However, where we learn lessons and we get good practice and best practice, then obviously we can take that and copy it in other places, but we shall still need to adjust it for size, location, numbers and all the rest of it. For example, I hope what we shall start to see, and I think we are starting to see it already, is that if you find a school which has really cracked the problem of 1,400 students at lunchtime by creating an absolutely wonderful lunchtime civilised experience, brilliantly done environmentally and, by the way, the food as well, then I should like everyone to look at that and see how you can replicate the thinking, even though the physical design will almost certainly need to be different in different places because we do have different numbers in places, we do have different locations. It would be very inappropriate to have a thatched mediaeval cottage-type school sitting just round the corner here in Westminster; you would not expect to do that. There are all kinds of reasons why it would not be appropriate to standardise all schools, but we can learn a great deal from best practice and that is an important part of the programme over the next year or two. We cannot wait too long to learn, but as good examples come up and that is why we need, good examples very, very fast. Q135 Chairman: Do we not already have them with the academies? Mr Sorrell: We have some examples, but we need a lot more. Mr Kester: We need to see examples from around the world and not just think little UK in that sense. There are fantastic examples of where new learning environments have been created abroad and we need to be able to share best practice wherever it is, so that we can disseminate that. It needs to be easy to get hold of and at the moment it is not. We held a conference last year for head teachers and showed them some of the possibilities that are being created around the world at the moment, new schools. We also took them through one or two exercises which were all about how you kick off the design process, all of them were saying "Oh, my God", but the ones who were going through it were saying "If only I had known this a year ago". So knowledge sharing is so important in this and we need light touch simple tools which can really ensure that any head teacher in any school that is going through a major programme like this has really good examples at their fingertips. In answer to your question, there are three distinct visions which need to coalesce when we are building a school: a national vision for education, a local and regional vision for education. Often the regional issues are so different in the North East from London and there might be issues of social exclusion or rural against city and those issues then translate and there is a whole different set of design problems. Then there will be individual school issues which really depend on the catchment area of the school and what that school is trying to achieve. Is this school going to be a music school? What sort of school is it? How is it going to define itself? There are three different visions and they need to come together in different ways then around the country. Q136 Paul Holmes: Some people have suggested that this opportunity of a whole wave of brand new schools gives us the chance to build exciting new learning environments which are 21st century, which are modern, which are go-ahead. Is there not a danger of fossilising whatever the fad of the moment is into a building that is going to be there for 40 years? For example, one academy which has been praised in the press for its design innovation has got open-plan classrooms and yet that is exactly the sort of trendy 1960s teaching that everybody was condemning a few years ago as being at the root of everything that is wrong in society. Mr Kester: I should agree. There are real risks in setting everything in stone. We do need to be looking at what a sustainable school is and a sustainable school does need to be a school that looks to the long term and perhaps therefore looks at its own mutability and builds that in. Steven Heppell, a renowned expert on this, sometimes does actually refer to the Lego school. We perhaps do need to look at schools which will react and can change according to changes in technology, our own understanding of the way that people learn, which also shifts over time, and what we are trying to achieve out of our education system. Q137 Paul Holmes: In the earlier answers there was a suggestion that not enough was being spent on design. The figure given was one per cent of the cost over the entire life of the school. We have had it suggested to us that, first of all on the timescale involved in the procurement process, when designers are making a pitch to a consortium they might only have 13 weeks to get across what they want and to try to win the bid. Is 13 weeks long enough to have serious input on design? Ms Cottam: No, definitely not from the point of view of working with the wider school community and, to go back to the learning vision, there is a massive amount of change coming in in what is needed from nought to 19 and if you are going to work out how that really relates to the capital investment, a lot longer is needed. We recommend a design process starts up to a year before any kind of capital programme starts to roll forward. Mr Kester: It is quite possible that that sort of design intervention that happens early may not involve the architect who is ultimately commissioned to build the school. Ms Cottam: It probably would not. Mr Kester: It probably does not. In cases where we have been working with schools, this is about building and understanding what is possible, what we could have, what we are trying to create here and really building a common vision locally of what that is so that then, when you do brief an architect, you are really able to communicate that very, very clearly as a damn good brief. Ms Cottam: If you have 13 weeks, what you are going to get is a secondary school, nought to 16, that is open from 9am to 3.30pm 192 days a year and that is it. That is where you are spending a lot of money for not very much in terms of the limitations as to what you are going to get out of that building. Q138 Paul Holmes: It was also suggested, in relation to that question, that in making the pitch you not only have only 13 weeks but also that the money for the design part of the concept was perhaps ten per cent of the total cost with most of the emphasis being on the best value, the cheapest options available, the construction costs and so forth. Is that true? John talked about one per cent on the whole-life cost but is a ten per cent figure true for the actual design and build part? Ms Cottam: I am not sure what the percentage is, but I know that there are all sorts of things. One of the things about this being a sustainable schools inquiry is that there is also quite of lot of work which can be done on the capital investment versus the recurrent expenditure and where you say that by having some sort of investment now it could be more expensive but save the footprint overprint. Those things also have to be worked out far too fast and there are many structural issues which make it impossible to make those gains. Mr Sorrell: I come back to the point about attitude again. There is an enormous concentration on things to do with time and cost which is just a ticket to the game. Of course things have to be done on time and for the money, but to do things brilliantly and deliver the kind of excellence which we have to have does take time. It is a combination of creating the right vision and brief but then working together with the architects, the designers, in what we call the conversation to make sure that that conversation reaches the conclusion which we can all be very proud of. Yes, you have to create enough time to do the job properly; it is ridiculous not to do so. Q139 Paul Holmes: What percentage should it be, ten per cent, 15 per cent, five per cent? Mr Sorrell: It is actually very difficult to answer that question. I should be happy to give you a paper about it afterwards, if that is okay? Q140 Paul Holmes: Hilary, you just said something about the trade-off on different issues such as spending a bit more now but saving money over 10, 20, 30 years of the life of the school, but not being able to build that in because of the timescale of arguing the case. One school we visited was an excellent design and the staff and pupils liked it. However, the school council, the pupils, said to us that they were actually quite disappointed because they were told it was about sustainable schools but they had no solar power, for example, solar panels on the roof, because it would cost too much upfront, even though the experience is that ten years down the line, it starts to save money for the building. Is that a common experience? Ms Cottam: Yes. I hope that the Committee will be asking for evidence from Jonathan Porritt, who will able to talk much more about what we are building and what those difficulties are. Actually the issues go deeper, not only that we cannot save in terms of the footprint, but we could also generate power into local communities from schools; it could be a cost recovery system. We are able to look at none of that at the moment in the frameworks in which schools are operating. Q141 Paul Holmes: Whose fault is that? Is that the procurement system as dictated by the Government who are providing money? Is it the fact that the construction firms have too much influence and the local education partnerships? Where is the fault on that? Ms Cottam: Again it is a very complex web of institutional arrangements. Our evidence, which we shall submit to the Committee, can speak to that, which probably would be best because to unpick that now is very complicated. Q142 Helen Jones: Education is going to change fairly rapidly in the coming years. We hear a lot about personalisation and we could see new methods of delivering learning. How can we ensure that our thoughts about what will happen in the future are actually built into the design process and how can we future-proof schools against the changes that will happen very rapidly in the education world in the future? Mr Kester: Without wishing to sound like a cracked record, it is back to the same point really which is to learn from the specialists, the teachers, the educationalists that we have in this country about what we really are trying to create as a vision for learning, what sort of techniques, what sort of education we are going to create for our young people. Are we trying to foster self-reliance amongst our young people? Are we trying to encourage creativity and the generation of ideas in our schools? What sort of educational experience is it going to be like? We talk now about a 14- to 19-year-old agenda where people may be moving across different sorts of educational institutions. What is that going to feel like, how are you going to achieve it? Are you going to move from your beautifully built glass box into a crummy run-down FE college for some of your lessons? What is this really going to feel like as a totality? We must have that sense of a national vision, but we must have a sense at a local level of what that educational experience is going to be like for a young person. We can fashion that and that is part of the brief: if you know what you are trying to create, you can fashion that. As long as we do not lock it down - and that comes back to the previous point - and say that there is only one way to do it and that is to lay your school out like this and you teach it like that, but actually build flexibility into our schools, we shall be okay. Q143 Helen Jones: If we are going to do that, it requires two things, does it not? It requires heads and local authorities and others involved in the design process to have a sense of what good design can deliver in educational terms. It also requires the designers to have some knowledge of what changes we expect in education in the future. Do you think both sides yet have that required sense of what good design can do and how it can work with education to deliver better outcomes? Ms Cottam: All the work that we have done has been with inter-disciplinary teams to foster that. It is obviously critical that both sides learn and this also goes back to the previous question about 13 weeks, because there is a quite a lot of learning and then those teams can also share the learning. At the moment there is not good enough understanding on each side. Another thing that is underlying many questions that come up is that there is not a real investment in an evaluation tool for ex-post evaluation so that learning can be shared from both sides going forward. There is a huge amount of knowledge. When you are talking about future-proofing, if we just think about the way that learning has changed since the 1950s, even if we could build schools which encapsulate that and think about the whole way we understand cognitive behaviour and things like that very differently now to 50 years ago, if we could make schools address that, we would have moved forward, never mind what the future-proofing is going to be. A lot of those things are technologically based, they are about flexibility within systems, they would allow for further future-proofing into the years to come. Mr Sorrell: We cannot be at all complacent about this and this is not easy. If we do not actually deliberately address the issue that you are raising, this will be a programme which is about delivering physical environments for kids to go to every day rather than the kind of flexible spaces with potential to change as we discover new things over the coming years. What I believe is very important is that over the next two to three years, a vital period, we need to be looking very, very, very hard at this and looking at and learning what is developing, as the visions are created, the briefs are created, the early schools are being done. This has to be a central question as we are doing it, because we shall learn as we go along what we need to do to create the kind of flexibility for those schools of the future, to do a future-proofing you are describing. We should not be at all sure at this moment that we have got it right, but we could over the next two to three years because in a way what we are into is a kind of phase of prototyping. We have a 10- to 15-year programme here. If we think about the next two or three years as a period where we are going to learn an enormous amount from what we are doing, then we could benefit from that enormously. Your question is absolutely vital. Q144 Helen Jones: But it is not just about what happens to the young people within school time. Somebody said earlier that if we get this wrong, it will just be a building where people go to. We are also looking at extended schools, we are looking through developments in the youth service to use a lot of the facilities in schools for community use, whether it is for young people or for adults outside time. It always seemed to me very bizarre that we have all these facilities that are locked up most of the time. That has to influence the design, does it not? How do you think it is best to involve the wider community in the design of schools? Do you have any examples of good practice on how that has been done and how we created buildings which can be used out of school hours with all the necessary security that that needs in place and so on? Can you tell the Committee about any good practice in that sphere? Ms Cottam: May I answer that on three levels? One is rather like the 12 points that you were talking about, the colour for example. There are some very simple things about involving the community. For instance, if you build buildings where the outside walls are on the street, it is very easy to open them up to the communities after hours and you do not need huge amounts of staff time to police boundaries, really simple things which can be learned and can be transferred from school to school. That is one thing. The second thing is to fund a design process as we have been talking about, to make sure the community is involved so it does actually meet community needs. It sounds incredibly simple, but we have seen time and time again that this does not happen. The third thing is back to my opening point which was about a learning vision. The one thing that I have to keep coming back to is that it is my concern that this is still a schools rebuilding programme, that this does not mesh properly with the vision that is from nought to 19 and is about extended schools, is about community learning, lifelong learning, the Every Child Matters agenda. We have all these very good policy agendas, but it is still not clear how BSF is fitted into this wider learning agenda. Q145 Chairman: What did you get out of Kingsdale? You referred to that research and you talked then about the management systems, curriculum issues alongside the design. What came out of that? Ms Cottam: A couple of things came out of it. We have to remember this started seven years ago, so actually seven years ago, saying that you should not divorce capital spend from your learning objectives was completely radical. We have moved on a long way because actually people now think that those two should be joined together. It is just that the structures are not in place and the incentives are not in place yet within the BSF programme to join them together. The other thing is that when we started Kingsdale, the things that came out of the community practice were things like extended schools, community initiatives that were not then in the policy agenda. We were able to feed a lot of that into the policy agenda. It is now being reflected back but has not been re-integrated into the loop of the capital programme. Q146 Paul Holmes: We have had figures given to us that, under the Building Schools for the Future programme, roughly £1,450 per square metre of school is allocated, whereas a typical office block would get £2,000 per square metre. Do those figure square from your experience? Does that mean we are valuing schools at only being 75 per cent of the worth of an office block? Mr Sorrell: Not far out. Q147 Chairman: Is that good enough? Mr Sorrell: I always say the same thing. Nothing but the best is good enough for our kids. There is an attitude again that because it is for children, then it does not have to be of the same quality as it would be for adults. Q148 Mr Chaytor: I just sense that each of you started your answers arguing in one direction and then in response to Helen's questions, you have done a bit of U-turn. This afternoon you started out saying how important design was and almost arguing the case for using the BSF programme to build a series of iconic buildings and then you finish off by saying you have no idea what the future is going to bring so you have to have complete flexibility. I do not understand how you can argue both cases simultaneously. If I may come back to the Tesco point, the point about a supermarket is that not every supermarket looks the same from the outside, because they all vary to some degree and some are more beautiful than others. The point is surely that the inside is infinitely flexible. Is that not the point about schools? We do not want to design things fixed in stone, however beautiful they may be, when we do not know what the next 50 years are going to be. That is the legacy we have from 40 years ago, is it not? Things were fixed in stone for a set of circumstances that no longer apply. How do you reconcile your passion for beautiful iconic buildings with your recognition that there has to be infinite flexibility for the next half century? Mr Kester: In a way I think I miscommunicated if I put across the view that I was trying to argue for lots of beautiful iconic buildings up and down the country. There can be a case for a beautiful building being a school. That can actually be very important. We have lots of examples in other areas, not just schools for a moment. If you think of Will Alsop's design for Peckham library, it is an iconic building, it is a great statement of civic pride and also a statement of what a library can be. In the same way, you can do the same with our schools. This is surely all about what goes on on the inside, not what it looks like on the outside and actually that is very much at the heart of what the Design Council has been working on. We called our work learning-environments work, not building projects, because it is all about the flexibility, the style of learning and how, when we build or refurbish a school, we support the teaching and good learning, but that is not to say you cannot also have a beautiful building which can give people lots of pride in the place that they go to every day. That can be a wonderful thing but that should not be the objective. Q149 Mr Chaytor: Is it not the case that the focus on the attractiveness of the building should largely be on the outside and the inside should just have maximum flexibility? Why not build a series of beautiful shapes? Mr Kester: Indeed; that would be the example I gave earlier and we should be happy to provide the Committee with information on the San Diego school which is indeed a warehouse. It is an old Navy warehouse. As such it does not particularly make a brave architectural statement on the landscape because it was an old Navy warehouse which has been refurbished of course, but on the inside it is a fantastic and innovative learning space which is very flexible and brings to bear a lot of the best techniques for the teachers and supports them in doing what they want to do. That is actually very brave and we should be learning those sorts of lessons in Britain. Mr Sorrell: It is not either/or; it has to be all of the things you are talking about. Of course, the way these buildings are going to function is absolutely vital and if they do not function well, then they are not going to work. The simple fact is that we have to do the very best we can now to get us as far as we can into the future, find what kind of flexibility is required and design that in. Of course we have to do that and we do not know all of the answers now, but if we work really hard and if we really focus on it over the next two or three years, we could get a lot of the answers that we are still searching for about the kind of flexibility that is required. Just to finish my point, I actually also believe that the buildings of course should look absolutely wonderful because then they are inspirational, they are the kind of buildings which make people say they are proud of their community. If you design an ugly, boring, dull, horrible school, what does that say about your community? Of course they should be beautiful, they should delight everybody who sees them and goes to them and uses them. For me it is not a question of either/or, we have to do all of it. Chairman: I just must chip in that we have some of the worst domestic architecture that I have ever seen in this country and perhaps we just get what we deserve. Q150 Mr Chaytor: That is my follow-on question really. It is not a great endorsement of British architecture that we still have not learned how to build a decent school. We have been building schools for 100-odd years and you are saying we still need to see how it goes over the next two or three years. Why is it we are so poor or why is it that we have not learned how to build a school that combines functionality and aesthetic value? Mr Sorrell: As has been pointed out earlier, it is a long time since we have done anything like this. If you talk to the architects - and there are some older architects who worked on the schools in the 1960s - they will tell you about the criteria then. They were not designing schools to last more than 30 or 40 years. That was what they were told was needed. We are in a different situation now. We are not saying we only want these schools to last 30 or 40 years. We want them to last much longer than that so there are different criteria. Some good schools are emerging. If you drive up into north London past Chalk Farm and look to the right, you will see an extraordinary looking building which is a school. If you go inside it, you will find it functions well, build quality is not bad and it is a very interesting example of what can be done. You might ask how flexible it is going to be when new methods of learning are developed over the next 20 or 30 years and the answer is that it probably is not as flexible as it needs to be. We could go to look at other examples where we would probably come to the same conclusions. Chairman: You must flag up any school you think we should visit. Q151 Mr Chaytor: May I ask specifically about the building specifications, particularly the BREEAM standard. All the new schools are supposed to comply with the BREEAM "very good" standard. That is the case, is it not? Is that "very good" good enough? Is it the case that within the BREEAM standard, you can score very highly on one of the criteria at the expense of others? You can score highly on water management but be hopeless on energy use. Is that how it works? Mr Sorrell: There is a real expert behind me on this. Richard Simmons really knows about this subject. Mr Kester: I have to say I am not an expert on BREEAM, but the only point I would want to raise, because BREEAM quite clearly does focus on the narrower environmental issues of a school, waste, energy consumption et cetera, is that I am not sure whether it really goes far enough because I have not got that detailed analysis to hand. What it does not do is take a broad view of sustainability. Q152 Mr Chaytor: What are the other criteria? Mr Kester: If you take the environmental view - and it would be great to have someone like Jonathan here - if you take the broader view of sustainability, you would be looking at balancing the environmental issues alongside the social benefits and economic benefits and you only really pull off sustainability, a sustainable school, when you have those three in harmony. Ultimately of course, you could argue for the most fantastic environmentally-thought-through school but if it is far too expensive to afford, we are not going to be able to do it. On the other hand, if the environmental benefits are to the detriment of the local community or the teaching experience, that also would not be good. Somehow one always has to bring those three into balance. Q153 Mr Chaytor: On the economic criterion, to what extent do you think that lifecycle costs should be a factor in the initial design brief? Mr Kester: Completely. Q154 Mr Chaytor: Do you think they have been in schools built so far, like the first academies for example? Mr Kester: I should probably have to come back to you on that to give a detailed answer on that, but we can do. We shall be providing you with our evidence and we shall be very happy to do that. We are providing evidence around BREEAM. Q155 Mr Chaytor: What is social sustainability? What is your understanding of that and how can that be measured and built into a design brief? Mr Kester: We were talking earlier about the benefit to the wider community and that would be a very good example. If a school is actually going to integrate effectively into its community, maybe it is going to be a sustainable school, is a school which does not shut its doors at 3.30 but is making the best use of that building and maximising the opportunities pretty much around the clock, providing as many opportunities for the ageing population that we have in the UK, which we know is only going to expand, how is a school going to respond to those issues and could they be great places for that? We have an increasing chronic disease issue in the UK. What about health? Are they going to be a great space to do work-outs and healthy living? What sort of social benefits is the school going to provide? Q156 Mr Chaytor: The logic of your argument therefore is that all schools under the BSF programme should be what the Government now calls extended schools. Mr Kester: Yes; absolutely. Q157 Mr Chaytor: So that is not the way it works. Being an extended school is not necessarily a requirement to attract BSF funding, is it? You are making an interesting point that, if the Government are committed to social sustainability, the school needs to have community links. Mr Kester: I would come back to the point that each school should have its own local vision. It comes back to the point that was made earlier about whether the designers are going to solve those problems. No. The designers can only solve the problems if they are given the problems and that means that ones needs to define those problems and say what you are seeking to achieve here. "For these situations, because we have social exclusion as an issue here, we believe that our school needs to provide really excellent opportunities for the youth in this area to become more engaged and involved and these are some of the possibilities and opportunities we are opening up for this school and therefore, because we are offering these sorts of services, this is the sort of brief that we should like to provide to our designers". The designers will react and provide the solutions to the problems that you give them. Mr Sorrell: Just a quick point. We just have to be cautious about generalisation here. If you visit somewhere like the Jo Richardson School near Becton, a secondary school, a very, very urban environment indeed, a very, very large number of students in the school, it is an extended school, for example they have a gym which the local community uses, it looks like it is working very well indeed and very successful, very integrated with the local community but it is a different kind of physical environment to, let us say, a school down in St Just in Cornwall that I know, where there would not be the demand for that kind of extended environment for the community. It is again another reason why it is just wrong to say you can take one-size-fits-all and deliver it anywhere. It just does not work, because our schools around the country in different places are very, very, very different and what would be a school which delivers in a particular way socially in the community in one place will have very different needs in another, so you have to be quite careful. Q158 Chairman: If design is so wonderful, what stops good design being used? There is a community out there with a view where educationalists will talk to designers and designers will talk to construction companies. What stops you guys being successful? Ms Cottam: Two things: one is that design, as we are talking about it, is not commonly understood. Even this afternoon we have seen the difficulty of us trying the convey to you what we understand as the design process versus your understanding of design as being beautiful architecture, which is important but only part of the whole process. Q159 Chairman: No, we are worried that that is what you think. Ms Cottam: There has obviously been a communication mismatch. For us design is an important problem-solving process of which beautiful buildings are only one part. The second thing is the process itself. Of course it costs money to get the good design process, it costs time, there has to be a structured process and you have to pay somebody to do it. Our argument would be to make sure that that can be done up front, because you will recoup the costs fast down the line as you go into the actual building process. At the moment the structure is not set up to enable that to happen. There are schools which know about it and want it and they cannot get it and there are those which do not know about it yet and need to be informed about it and it needs to be afforded to them. Mr Kester: I should say that there are two big obstacles: one is an experience deficit which is the point about first-time clients. In the end, take the best design projects that you have around the world and they usually had fantastic clients leading them. This is a really important issue which all points to the fact that you need to have your good early design processes, that you do not want design to start in that 13-week period of procurement, you want design to start much, much earlier, all about getting really design savvy and design able early on. The other thing is the time, with particular reference here to schools, the time-poor environment of a school, where there are so many priorities on teachers and one is of course adding another one when one is saying the pupils and they have to be involved in a whole process here in defining what the future school is, when on the other hand there are GCSEs, A-levels, 101 other pressures. What we have to do is forge the space to do this properly and also, and there are some real lessons in the work of Joined-up Designs for Schools, in making it fun too. If that process is enjoyable, that creative process in defining your vision and engaging everybody, then people just want to do it rather than be bullied into doing it. Q160 Chairman: Is not John's whole process of Joined-up Designs for Schools, which he knows I support absolutely, a kind of a one-club effort in a sense? What I am getting from you is that the crucial thing you have to have is an informed client who knows that they want certain kinds of things to happen in the building, flexibility, new IT options, all of that, but you also want someone who knows what they want about sustainability. They want to seriously take on the issues of the carbon footprint and all that. You are liberating the student to say that, but are you really liberating other people in the school community, even the local authority and the teacher to have a real impact on that? Mr Sorrell: The Sorrell Foundation Joined up Designs for Schools programme focuses absolutely on pupils. They are the ones who are most excluded and are the least likely to be asked what they think. The whole client group is absolutely vital and it is a complex client group. You do not always have that many people involved as you do here, but it is a necessity, that is the way it is. What is absolutely important is for the client team to be a cohesive coherent unit and that includes head teachers, teachers, parents, governors, the LEA and the pupils. If you can get the vision from them produced in a way that the people who are going to design the school can understand, then you have a conversation. You do not just do this in five minutes or in a focus group, this takes time as we keep saying and the conversation develops over a period of time and you will pretty much always get a good result. I should just like to answer the question about what stops good design, if I may. I am very pleased you asked the question what stops good design, because the point I made earlier was that design happens. Everything gets designed, not necessarily by the right people. Decisions are not necessarily made by people who really know how to make them and in this particular case with schools we have a client group, that big stakeholder group, who are not the world's leading experts on this subject. They do need all the help that they can be given and we do need to inform them so that they can be better clients. The thing that really stops good design in the end is attitude. It is the attitude that somehow or other design is a kind of add-on extra that you do not really need. It is absolutely fundamental to the success of the Building Schools for the Future programme and, if we can design these schools right, then they will be successful. Chairman: Thank you very much. We have run out of time. That has been a really stimulating session. I hope you will remain in contact with us. We need your help in that we have only just started this inquiry. We want to know who else we should see and call in to give evidence. We also need to know what we should look at and if you can help in that process or if there is anything you did not say to the Committee in this session that you should have said, you know where to find us. Thank you very much. Insert B
Memorandum submitted by SchoolWorks,
Insert C
Memorandum submitted by SchoolWorks on behalf of British Council for School Environments
Insert D
Memorandum submitted by Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Ty Goddard, Schoolworks and Mr Richard Simmons, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), gave evidence. Chairman: May I welcome Richard Simmons and Ty Goddard to our deliberations? I am sorry you are getting a bit squeezed but there were more of them and they had first innings. There is going to be some emphasis on sharp questioning and succinct answers. Let us get through as much as we can and Stephen is going to lead us. Q161 Stephen Williams: With sharp questioning, Chairman. May I start with Mr Goddard? In your written submission to the Committee you have expressed a worry that local authorities see people's involvement in consultation as a luxury rather than an essential part of this particular programme. What sort of consultation do you think local authorities should actually undertake? Can you give us some good examples of where local authorities have come up with some best practice that others could follow and where authorities perhaps have not been so good? Mr Goddard: SchoolWorks is concerned with just that, the participation of stakeholders. We are different from Joined-up Design for Schools in the sense that we put an emphasis on the full complex range of stakeholders both within the school and outside the school. A best practice example would be work with Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council. They have been particularly impressive in not paying lip service to young people's views. What they have actually done is mainstreamed young people's views, stakeholder views both within their business case for Building Schools for the Future, but also in the scoring process. A lot of what you were talking about earlier, about how important design is, is in reality how important a score it is actually given when you come to evaluate all of the different bids that you get for particular jobs in particular local areas? My worry about consultation is that it is very patchy at the moment. It depends on how a local authority feels about it. The general pre-conceived incorrect view is that stakeholder engagement is complicated, it raises people's expectations and it takes lots and lots of time and money. In fact what you heard today was an exposition about why it makes educational sense to have young people and others, all of the stakeholders, because where is transformation going to come from? What does transformation mean in this case? I have some difficulties in interpreting it myself because I hear lots of transformatory visions all around the country and there is no common language. The problem that we have, and it is one of the biggest challenges and that is where our expertise is, is that the involvement of stakeholders in Building Schools for the Future is not uniform. It is patchy and it is not accorded enough actual exposition throughout the process. For us it also makes good business sense. You mentioned contractors earlier and the progressive contractors and others have for a long time seen the benefits of proper stakeholder engagement in terms of being able to prioritise their spend on particular buildings. There is no point actually prioritising a spend on something people do not want or which can become redundant in the future. So those are my worries: patchy, not uniform, little bits of good practice and the immediate one I quote is Knowsley who need to be congratulated. Other authorities have tried to do it, but they have met a number of challenges. Mr Simmons: Firstly you have to understand who the client is around here and we do a lot of work through our enabling programme People Procuring Schools and principally that is with local education authorities. There are some good examples of head teachers and teachers being involved. I should cite the Jo Richardson School in Barking as a good example where the head had a clear vision for pedagogy. We might come back to some of the issues around flexible design later on, but certainly he had a view about how he wanted teaching to happen and that is not really as common as it should be at the moment. If you are talking about PFI, then of course you have the relationship with the contractor and with local education partnerships which are developing now, you may well have a situation where there is an exemplar school where a contractor is picked and then the process by which we get down to individual school designs is still unclear. There is one other thing I should like to mention which is that the Office of Government Commerce, as you may know, produces guidance on design in procurement. There is a series of gateways, as the OGC calls them, which you have to go through for design. One of those is called post-occupancy evaluation. So we are not just talking about involving pupils, teachers and head teachers at the point of purchase, we also want to learn from what has happened. At the moment post-occupancy evaluation is a scarce commodity and we are certainly arguing very strongly, and the OGC have just acknowledged this, that you have to go back to find out from people what has worked and what has not worked so you can learn for future programmes. Q162 Stephen Williams: Just to follow up on what you said about post-occupancy evaluation, are you confident that there is enough flexibility in the designs of schools for you to be able to amend the design? If a pupil comes forward and says "We are being bullied in this corridor that leads around a corner and want to get rid of it" can you actually alter the design thereafter? Mr Simmons: That will depend on the design of the school you are talking about. The point about flexibility is an interesting one. We should certainly argue that one way to achieve that is by increasing the amount of space available for classrooms and flexible areas for personal learning, for example. If you were to design a completely flexible interior environment, you still have the problem of what happens when you come to refurbish or change that school but, as you probably know, because we have tabled it as evidence, we have just conducted a survey of 52 of the 124 secondary schools built in the last five years, which CABE has done as part of its normal work, and we are pleased to say it arrived just at the point when this Committee was meeting. We are not confident at all that those kinds of issues of flexibility are being taken on board in a very large number of schools. Q163 Stephen Williams: Mr Goddard mentioned Knowsley as a good LEA example of consultation. Mr Simmons mentioned Barking School as a good example. Who should be the driver on consultation? Is it the school, the head and the governors, is it the LEA or is it the contractors who are doing the building work? Mr Goddard: Part of the issue is exactly what Richard said that there is sometimes a real difficulty about assessing who the client is. Sometimes, for instance, local authorities might actually feel that they are the client more than an individual school and perhaps sometimes an individual school will feel they are more of a client than a local education authority. In a sense, the two examples, what you have in Jo Richardson in Barking in Dagenham is a supportive local education authority which was prepared to look at pedagogy, teaching and learning, in a different way. Then it went through a process of early consultation and actually used a firm of architects to enable that early consultation work to take place. The actual school was then built by a completely different firm of architects using a lot of the findings from that early firm. So clearly Barking and Dagenham owned that, but clearly the constructor and a pioneering head teacher also owned that. You heard earlier about the complex set of relationships. This is a complex business and to get everybody speaking a common language is the actual challenge. Q164 Chairman: How did it work in Knowsley? As I understand it, Knowsley actually decided to build the same school on eight locations. It was a sort of Tesco solution, so not much discussion with the other seven even if they did it in one. Mr Goddard: Knowsley are in a Building Schools for the Future wave. What they decided was that with the scale of transformation that they wanted to see and the need within their local area, they were very, very serious about actually having proper stakeholder groups but also skilled stakeholders. What actually happened was that you got 150-odd people who represented a number of the interests in that particular locality and they themselves were the drivers of transformation. Q165 Chairman: They said they all wanted the same school? Mr Goddard: In a sense no; not that they all wanted the same school. What they wanted were common outcomes. Q166 Chairman: What is the difference between that and wanting the same school? Mr Goddard: In the sense that it is too early to say that they have got the same school, the bidding process is still underway, it is down to a short list, there are three supply chains at the moment, so we actually do not yet know the result of the Knowsley process and it would be too early to generalise. What is interesting is that they are not having a LEP, they are not having a local education partnership; they have come up with their own scoring matrix and they have empowered people profoundly in the sense of taking people on school visits not only in the UK but outside of the UK. Absolutely key is the briefing process but also how good your client is. Is that client able to be the perfect magpie and take some of the attributes of Danish schools for instance and make them fit what Knowsley wants to do? Are they able to take ideas from the Jo Richardson Community School and inhabit them in Knowsley? Q167 Stephen Williams: We were talking about the complexity of the client groups involved. Does the consultation need to be broken down, for instance on ICT or facilities management? Should the consultation be done by the specialists or the providers in that field and consultation with certain people? Mr Goddard: What I know from one of the examples we are talking about at the moment is that subject heads were empowered quite considerably in the Jo Richardson school to think about what they needed in their particular subject area. Yes, in a sense you have to have some quite profound generalised stakeholder engagement, but then, as you have suggested, you do need to drill down in terms of particular subject areas. Mr Simmons: I agree. We keep talking about Jo Richardson and there are other examples: St Francis of Assisi in Liverpool, which is the school that set environmental sustainability as part of its core curriculum. It is an academy, so it is part of its specialist subject. They have tried to approach the issues differently from Jo Richardson and they have had the opportunity of being an academy to try to be more specific about what they want to achieve. For example, their whole building reflects the ethos; it has green roofs and so on. It is important that people understand the ethos that the school is trying to create. There are clearly areas where standards and standardisation are useful because they save money. Things like toilet design: we do not need to go on re-inventing toilets, we know the kinds of toilets that work for schools and prevent bullying. We know that broad corridors with natural daylight in them are far better and again reduce bullying, although sadly they are not being built as much as we should like to see. We know that outside the school, a good variety of spaces, some hard, some soft, some places where you can go to sit down and so on, are valuable but there are also things which make a school right for its locality. Jo Richardson, for example, is right for its locality because it is a community school and there is a very clear demarcation line between the school and the community facilities there, for example they share a library. Those kinds of issues will only really emerge from very local engagement and, as you say, looking at those specialist areas and making sure they are fit for purpose. Q168 Stephen Williams: Can we go on to participation by pupils and other groups? Do you think that an obligation should be placed on each new school that they actually set up a pupil/client group? As I understand it, that is not necessarily the case at the moment. Mr Simmons: It is certainly not the case at the moment. I should like to start with teachers because teachers have not been talked about quite so much by the Committee so far. Q169 Chairman: I tried, but John Sorrell knocked me back. Mr Simmons: Involving pupils is obviously an important thing to do but teachers and head teachers in particular are very important. I also agree with what the Committee was saying about the fact that nobody can quite foresee what education will be like in 10, 15, 20 years' time. You have to think about flexibility and this is a tough challenge for teachers. What our enablers, the people who go out and advise clients, are finding at the moment and reporting back in our survey is that very often people are so glad to have a new non-leaking school and they have invested so much of their time and energy in it that they have not necessarily focused on how teaching and pedagogy might change or how they might use the new school to transform the curriculum. We have put in for you some evidence which the Scots have gathered - I hope it is okay to mention the Scottish Executive in this company. They have been looking very hard at setting standards for environmental sustainability and have been off and looked at good practice in Sweden and Germany. From that, they have looked at the whole way in which schools are designed, from the point of view of sustainability, starting with the people who will use them, starting with how the young people will be engaged and looking at how, for example, young people will go on monitoring how a school works into the future. If you are a pupil five years into a new school, you will not necessarily be involved in its design, but what you can be involved in is simple monitoring systems which allow you to work out how much energy it is using and how you might improve on that in the future. There are ways of actually involving people through the whole life of the school and into the curriculum which are being tried in continental Europe and which we could learn from. Q170 Stephen Williams: If you think teachers should be involved and perhaps pupils, do you think there should be an obligation to involve pupils? That was the question I asked. Mr Simmons: Yes. The way that the procurement processes work at the moment is becoming more complex because there is more plurality available moving away from just using PFI. In PFI projects the whole pace at which you have to work and the way in which the design process works mean it is quite hard to achieve that kind of engagement and often it is not clear who the client is. To answer to your question, there certainly should be pupil engagement but it would be very demanding to ask for that immediately, without a fairly significant change in the procurement process, so it may be a journey we have to go on to achieve it. Q171 Stephen Williams: So are you saying the current procurement does not allow adequate time for pupil involvement? Mr Simmons: It does not allow for time and quite often the client, if it is a local education authority, are not necessarily in the best position to involve pupils because the best people to do that are the parents, teachers and governors of the school. Ty has obviously greater expertise than I in this, but that would be our analysis. Q172 Stephen Williams: You mentioned pupils, teachers, head teachers, governors and other people involved in schools. What about dinner ladies and cleaners? Is there a role for them in the design of the kitchens and the dining hall and corridors they have to clean? Mr Simmons: We are certainly interested in some of the best housing schemes we have looked at procured by social housing landlords who have involved the management team in the design process, as well as the people who actually have to run the housing side of things. The results of that have been places that are much more pleasant to live in. I should say the same principle would apply here. Q173 Stephen Williams: I suppose neighbours of the school would be another example, but they might be covered by the planning process, so I guess they would be consulted at a later stage. Do you think it would better if they were consulted early on before we get to a formal planning application? Mr Simmons: There are certainly some interesting examples of schools which have been developed where, because the people who have developed the school have taken notice of what the neighbours have had to say about, for example what happens at lunchtime, they have provided different lunchtime arrangements. So if they provided cafeteria-type arrangements with a broader menu, they found fewer kids out on the streets at lunchtime and quite often getting over that first issue of the impact of being a neighbour of a school starts a dialogue that can go on, so there are certainly benefits in doing that. It does have to be a manageable process of course and the first point we should always make is that plan and procurement by a well-informed client is the best way forward. If you are going to engage communities, you have to plan that into the timetable. Q174 Stephen Williams: May I ask a couple of questions on procurement to Mr Goddard? SchoolWorks suggest in their written evidence to us that the current bidding process creates some unnecessary duplication in terms of contractors' discussions with schools on designs. Is the bidding process not essential to make sure you get the best contractor to come forward with the best design? Mr Goddard: It was a worry that we wanted to share with you about our work. We have been involved in one of the early Building Schools for the Future project waves in Bradford and we had three individual supply chains and they were all talking to the schools involved in Bradford. I felt that there was a way that we could mutualise the approach. For instance, on Tuesday evening supply chain A was talking to that particular school and on Wednesday evening supply chain B and Thursday evening supply chain C. Q175 Chairman: Could you call a spade a spade? What does "supply chain" mean? Mr Goddard: I am sorry. I should love to call a spade a spade if it were called a spade. The supply chain is the people bidding to build schools. Q176 Chairman: Can we have it in English? The great general public are going to read this report and it is gobbledegook. Tell us, who the people are in there and which companies they represent. Mr Goddard: I almost have to supply my own glossary of terms because that is not my own language. Those are various construction firms and their suppliers who have come together to bid to build a local authority's particular school under Building Schools for the Future, commonly known out there, and I agree it is not a word I would use in my local either, as supply chains. All the people who wanted to win the job in Bradford had got onto a short list. Q177 Chairman: We understand the concept; it is just that other people have to understand it. Mr Goddard: Good point; I apologise. In a sense though, the point still is that there was no single conversation with schools. I felt that the capacity - and we heard this earlier when somebody talked about "time poor" within schools - and the nature of what it takes to run and manage a school had not actually been fully appreciated. What I thought was worthy of comment and investigation was whether we could actually have a process that was mutual around stakeholder engagement at the shortlist stage. Q178 Chairman: Are you saying that the consultation process is not thorough enough and does not reach far enough, but the bidding process is long drawn out and does not respond or tie up to the consultation? Mr Goddard: What I am saying is that the participation with stakeholders, both under Building Schools for the Future and all sorts of other capital streams is patchy at the moment and at times the frenzied 12- or 13-week process does not actually help to get views of stakeholders early enough and in fact could actually make it worse. What happens is that you duplicate processes of finding out what clients, what teachers, what pupils actually want. Q179 Stephen Williams: How well do you think that the local education partnership model is working in providing good schools? Mr Goddard: What I hear is people who talk about - this is another glossary term you might need - fat LEPs, thin LEPs, all sorts of different shaped LEPs. From what I perceive when I travel around the country there is not universal acclamation for the concept of local education partnerships. Partly this is quite a complex process of different investors having different percentages, but also it has led to certain fears within local authorities about what the actual functions of those LEPs are. I understand that CABE's recent research that was published today also has findings on LEPs. Mr Simmons: It is a bit early to say what LEPs will produce because none of them has built anything yet. What we have done is look at schools that have been built over the last five years and found that about half of them do not measure up; they are poor or mediocre against the design quality indicators which the DfES and ourselves use. So it is a relatively objective measure and this is not about icons, by the way: this is about whether there is natural daylight in classrooms and whether the corridors are wide enough and some of those basic things. We should like to see more beautiful buildings, but we should also like to see buildings that function well first and foremost. Not all local authorities are choosing LEPs of course, because they have a choice ranging from traditional procurement through to LEPs. What we are seeing at the moment in the early engagement we have with Building Schools for the Future generally is that there are some very good schemes out there actually, but there are quite a lot that our enablers, who are the people who have direct involvement - an enabler is an architect or a designer who works to advise a client for the first 10 to 15 weeks of a project in getting the best possible deal in terms of design and so on - are not seeing sufficient evidence that there really is good design. May I just pick up a point that you made earlier on? You said that the procurement process will produce good design if there is competition between three firms. I think that was implicit in what you said. Actually that is not the case and it certainly was not the case in PFI projects because it is possible to be selected for a PFI scheme if you have a good finance package and good maintenance and management package, but you do not have good design. We have put in some pictures. This is a PFI school which was value engineered and which has no external landscaping apart from tarmac and grass. That was value engineered out of the project after the contract had been accepted. Q180 Chairman: Where is this? Mr Simmons: My team has not told me because these are not name-and-shame-type photographs. Q181 Chairman: Is it not about time we started naming and shaming some of the people who build some of this awful stuff? Mr Simmons: What we are trying to do is give you examples of good practice, but we also have to look at what has not worked. Q182 Chairman: This Committee gets around a bit. We have seen in some of the places you expect to see wonderful practice some awful schools in Scandinavia; we have seen a terrible school, one of the worst I have ever seen, in the Republic of Ireland; we have seen a wonderful school in my time in Belfast. Mr Simmons: Perhaps we may suggest to the Committee a range of schools they might go to see which illustrates various examples. Q183 Chairman: What are we doing to stop the very process of the last five years, new schools being built, narrow corridors and no natural daylight? How can we stop this? Mr Simmons: We believe that more support is being given to clients now. More people are assisting clients at the start of the process, but one of the most effective things we do is something called design review where we actually get experts, architects and so on, to provide peer review for the schemes. We think that there should be a lot more of that. We also think that Partnerships for Schools and the DfES should increase the weighting for good design that is provided when LEPs are selected. We also think there needs to be quite a lot of vigilance. It looks as though quite a lot of local education partnerships make a selection based on some exemplar schemes and of course they will then be getting detailed design project by project and there needs to be vigilance throughout the process to make sure that we do not see the kind of value engineering - in the jargon. Value engineering is when you start to cut the cost of a project. Q184 Chairman: Value engineering is a wonderful term. So you end up with a school surrounded by tarmac. Mr Simmons: Yes. It depends how you see value. There is some research from the States, from California, to show that if you have good natural daylight in the classroom, people will learn faster, they will learn maths 20 per cent faster and languages 26 per cent faster and this is fairly well peer-reviewed research. Q185 Chairman: Richard, I did not need a survey from California to suggest that natural daylight was good for education. Mr Simmons: One of your colleagues was asking for the background research to all this, so we do have that available. Q186 Helen Jones: I am interested in this survey that you have conducted. I wonder whether you could enlighten us as to where CABE put in support, what kind of support you put into schools and how that fed through into improvements in your view? Mr Simmons: We tried to tailor the support we provide depending on the needs of the client. Basically what we do is provide 10 to 15 days of free time from an architect or other designer who will advise the client about getting a good procurement process going. It is about how to select the best architect's designs but particularly how to get the brief as right as you can. The brief is the document you try to produce at the outset of the project to explain what it is you want. We found in the survey that where people have been clear about what they want, they quite often get it. The problem arises when people are perhaps less clear about what they want. Where the DfES, for example, have specified things like classroom sizes, you get that size of classroom. If you want something bigger, and Jo Richardson did, they had to provide extra funding from the single regeneration budget to get larger classrooms. They had one of our enablers working with them and they said that they wanted to teach the kids differently here, they wanted to sit them in a horseshoe rather like you are sitting and they wanted to have the teacher at the front of the class and they wanted to have things like the visualiser, which is a piece of hi-tech kit you use these days instead of an overhead projector, at the front and they wanted the kids all to be sitting where the teacher could see them, they could see the teacher and they could focus on the lessons. That is what they have done and that is really the kind of thing that our enablers assisted them with. They have helped them to work out how they could actually achieve that in the procurement process. Q187 Helen Jones: I understand that, but I am presuming, maybe wrongly, that you do not have the resources to do that for every school so how can we replicate the lessons that have been learned there into the whole Building Schools for the Future programme? Mr Simmons: Time permitting, we have made quite a lot of recommendations here. It is certainly possible, and in fact we have been talking to DfES and Partnership for Schools quite positively about this, to get a better review process going on so that the majority of schemes can be looked at at the right stage in the process. The key stages are the point when you have three bidders and you want to assess whether they are all going to produce good designs or not; then further into the process at the point when you are getting down to the design that will actually get built, those are the kind of key processes or key times. That is certainly achievable. If you think about the scale of this programme and the fairly modest resource it would require just to make those simple checks, it is not a huge percentage. I cannot tell you what the percentage is, although we can come back to you about that, but it is not a huge percentage of the cost of the programme to put in place the kinds of checks that will certainly reduce the risk and there are always going to be risks, there will always be some schools that slip through the net for one reason or another. However, we know enough now about the basic functional design of schools to deal with some of those issues. I do agree with the Committee that there is a challenge to say "How do we make sure the schools will be still fit for purpose 15 to 20 years down the track and how do we achieve flexible design and perhaps more research is needed on that. We do also know that schools like St Francis of Assisi have looked at that and decided that they want to provide some flexible spaces that can be used differently in different ways in the future. That is not rocket science: good schools have always done that in fact. Q188 Helen Jones: That is fine, but you say you have to be clear about what you want. Earlier we heard a lot about Knowsley. Knowsley was actually reducing its number of secondary schools as well and in a number of authorities, my own included at the moment in a way which I heartedly disapprove of, dealing with falling rolls is getting mixed up with Building Schools for the Future. How in that case can you get the client group to focus on how they transform educational opportunities and use the building programme to do that when you actually have, you are going to have by the nature of things, people who are disaffected from the beginning if their school is closing. Do you have any experience to offer us on that? Mr Goddard: No, not specifically from the SchoolWorks experience. My own personal experience in Lambeth was having to deal with massive numbers of surplus places. It is very, very difficult whilst you are trying to rebuild facilities that are going to be flexible and fit for a 21st century and beyond curriculum to deal with some of the structural issues within an education authority. There is a tension; you are absolutely right. Q189 Helen Jones: I was not just pointing to tension. If the whole point about getting good design depends on getting engaged with your client group, how do you do that when two schools may be merging into one, when you have people who are already disaffected from the process? How has that been managed? Mr Goddard: I am not here to tell you that the participation of stakeholders is a magic wand, is a complete panacea. What I do see, and it is around the word "ownership", is that people, local population, local residents can own very, very challenging questions themselves. What is happening in that particular area of Knowsley is an attempt to skill people up, give them a knowledge base with which to work with various professionals who all, by the way, probably speak their own tribal language in terms of these issues. It is not top-down, it is about actually saying to that local community or communities "We are facing these issues as an area, as an administrative area, please come and help us sort these out". Mr Simmons: I shall have to speak from my previous experience as a local authority director which is that you have to deal with the conflict first, you are right; huge conflict arises when there are proposals for school mergers and rationalisations and reductions. This really applies to community engagement in a number of sectors and the first thing is to be honest with people and to have a proper discussion about the facts of the situation. In schools, the other thing I have seen work well is when you actually focus on the young people and their education. It is very easy to become entangled in the histories of schools and so on, but if you think about the future of the young people and how they are going to get the best out of a new situation, then that is always a strong focus, it draws people together. We talked about how complex it is to identify the client. Very often the local authority is standing in loco head teacher in these kinds of situations because the head may not have been appointed and it is not easy. The way the Building Schools for the Future programme works of course does quite often drive you down the route. There are several places where this is going on and this may be an area where we need to look further at where there are examples of good practice that we can draw on. Q190 Helen Jones: Can you identify for us any problems which are affecting the first wave of the BSF schools and are there lessons that we can learn for the future? Mr Simmons: Because there are not actually any open in the first wave yet, there are some pathfinders coming on in spring --- Chairman: Roll that back. You have some of these awful schools which have been built over the last five years and Helen is asking you what we can learn from them? Q191 Helen Jones: Before starting on the pathfinders we want to know what lessons we can learn before this massive amount of money is irrevocably committed to things which may not be fit for purpose in the future. Mr Simmons: I can give you some specifics. If I may talk about the kind of schools that have been built over the last five years which were built under PFI, a small number of pathfinders and some academies - and we looked at 52 of 124, so it was a sample survey - I can give you some specific examples from individual schools, which is probably rather easier than talking about the statistical survey. The school had to adopt a one-way system because the corridors had been designed to be too narrow because of value engineering, if I may use the term now we have an understanding of what it means. Another school had an atrium, a large glazed area at the centre of the school, where the ventilation to keep that atrium cool was actually fed into the neighbouring classrooms which meant that the noise passed from the atrium into the classrooms. Another atrium which had a glazed roof had no, there is a jargon term, I shall not use it, Venetian-blind-type things to keep the sun out which therefore overheats and there is not adequate ventilation. We are talking about the school I mentioned earlier where there is no landscaping apart from tarmac and some grass for the playing field and a school where they created an egg-shaped layout. There is some good guidance actually which DfES provides about layout of schools and there are some good models for layouts of schools. The idea of the street in a secondary school with areas off, halls, classrooms et cetera. This one was egg shaped with the hall in the middle, so that when people came to do exams in the hall in the middle they had the noise of the school passing around them all day. A school with L-shaped classrooms where the teachers had not been consulted about the pedagogy, the teaching methods they wanted to follow and they did not really want L-shaped classrooms but the supplier had supplied L-shaped classrooms based on a Canadian model. Those are some of the issues. Q192 Chairman: These are very depressing examples. Mr Simmons: There are some good examples. I was about to come on to those. Q193 Chairman: I know you have good examples but what we try to do in this Committee and the point of this inquiry is to stop what has been going on and stop it before the BSF rolls out. This is very, very recent history; this is not what happened in the 1960s, it is what has happened in the last five years. Mr Simmons: Yes, this is very recent. Q194 Chairman: What we really want to get out of this evidence session is how we can stop it happening and that was the push of Helen's question to you. Mr Simmons: To give you some idea of what has not worked. There are some schools where things are the opposite, where things have worked very well, like Bedminster down in Bristol where the attendance of pupils has risen because the school is attractive and well laid out. We have provided you with quite a lot of material showing examples from all over Europe which work well. So going on to our process --- Helen Jones: Why? Why does one work and the other not? That is what we are trying to find out. What makes things go pear-shaped in the way that you have described? Q195 Chairman: We are politicians. We like to track down who did it. In other words, are there terrible builders out there who should never have been allowed to build another school? Are there rotten architects/designers out there who should never have been able to tender for a school again and so on? What went wrong? If you talk to other people - and I have to say that it is my whole life experience - you talk to an architect and you say "There is that awful building, what happened?" and it is never the designers or the architects, it is somebody else guv. How do we track down whose fault or what combination of faults went on in those bad examples and then eradicate them? Mr Simmons: We have heard from Ty and it is complicated, but there are some key things we can do to improve matters. The first is the point about initial preparation, being clear about your brief and what it is you want and then sticking to your guns. Being confident as a client is important and you hit the nail on the head earlier on when you made the point about strong effective clients. I agree with David Kester, if you are a client for Building Schools for the Future programme, you have probably not been a client for some time because there has not been this scale of building before and you need support and help in that process. Partnerships for Schools and DfES are working on providing that at the moment and it is also fair to say that in our survey in 2005 we did see a fairly significant improvement in school design so the message is getting through to some extent. Evaluating the bids is important. It is actually really important that in the evaluation process design is not sidelined or people do not think it is about icons or about having signature architects. It is certainly important to have good architects and establishing you have a good project team with good, experienced architects who have built large projects before; it may not necessarily always have been in the education sector but good client teams are important. We found some contractors whose performance was fairly consistent: contractors who were not building the best schools were not building the best schools consistently and good designers were consistently building good schools. So some good architects were building good schools and some not so good architects, I would certainly agree with you about that. Those were really the four key things. We have a whole series of other recommendations, but that is really at the heart of it. Q196 Helen Jones: But when that happens no-one seems to be held to account. If a local authority is about to start on a building programme, should it not have access to a list of firms or architects or whoever that have made a mess of it in the past to ensure that they are not allowed to make a mess of it somewhere else? Is that information available? Mr Simmons: There are some fairly serious legal constraints on doing that. Q197 Chairman: Are there? Mr Simmons: Yes, I should think so. We can certainly provide evidence. Things like awards programmes and exemplar projects tell you who the good people are. Q198 Chairman: Under the privilege of the House you can tell us all the bad ones right now and there will be no legal problems. Mr Simmons: Had I brought a list with me. If you look at our design review programme, which looks at projects like schools, you can certainly see who the good teams are because you can see consistently who is getting good results, you can also see who is not. There is quite a lot of information out there already. Q199 Chairman: Give it to this Committee and I am sure you can do it under parliamentary privilege. Mr Goddard: What a profound question. Why did it go pear-shaped? In a sense what typifies a project that goes pear-shaped is a lack of communication, a lack particularly around the school connecting the design and build with the vision of teaching and learning in that particular school and also, it is about the capacity of the clients. Often what we are asking people to do, and we heard this earlier, is to lead on a project which is probably the biggest project they have ever done, either as an individual or as a local authority or indeed as a head teacher. Despite the plethora of enablers, despite all the client design advisers, despite the DQIs, despite this, despite BREEAM, what we still have, and it is shown from the CABE survey, is a danger of creating schools which are not fit for purpose and that worries me. One lesson we have learned is that you have to create a forum where industry can talk to industry, schools can talk to industry, outside of the frenzy of a bidding process. We have heard about the 13 weeks and what cannot be done and what can be done. Often architects' practices are designing for instance three schools to put to a bidding process in 12 weeks and surely you cannot do your best job designing three schools in 12 weeks? You also cannot do your best job if you only have a matter of hours with particular clients from one week to the next. What happens is that there is a lack of relationship and a lack of the kind of magic that can happen between client and professional and for that very reason we are involved with others in setting up a new membership body called the British Council for School Environments. We have no organisation in this country that is dedicated to working with industry and local authorities to share good practice, to develop a common language which cuts across and cuts through all of the silos which actually happen and can dangerously happen in the building of public buildings including schools. Q200 Chairman: Is that related to the British Council for School Design? Mr Goddard: The British Council for School Environments, BCSE. Q201 Mr Marsden: Just picking up this issue of how we can involve people in things that are going to work rather than disasters, I apologise I had to be on another instrument committee, so I was absent for about half an hour, but it is very striking to me that in everything I have heard so far the word "materials" has not passed anybody's lips as far as I am aware. Surely one of the issues as to why things went so badly wrong from the ideals of Corbusier and the modern movement when they were then translated into buildings in the 1950s and 1960s and the flat roofs is that actually nobody thought about the cheapskate materials that many builders at the time would actually use to realise these architectural gems. What I should like to ask is who, in this whole procurement process, is actually leading? Is there a materials tsar? Who is actually leading or consulting people on what materials work? Teachers have worked in classrooms with certain materials that have just not worked in terms of heating or the finish has been appalling or whatever. Where do materials come into all this? Mr Simmons: It is a very important point. In a previous job, I was involved in the development of the Hackney Community College in Shoreditch and we had on the site two former board schools from the 19th century and a 1960s clasp school. The board schools could be refurbished and met very high environmental standards; the clasp school had to be demolished because it was unfit for purpose and could not actually be made environmentally sustainable, in fact it could not be heated sensibly. It is a very good point and there is some evidence which we have put in from our colleagues in Scotland who are our partners, the Scottish CABE as it were, which addresses materials very specifically and there are several issues around materials. One is the extent to which materials provide you with a good sound environmental platform, so mass concrete, although not attractive unless treated, is a very good way to retain heat in a building and makes it much cheaper to heat and allows the use of passive ventilation; a jargon term which means not having air conditioning or fans moving air around. Q202 Chairman: As in this building. Mr Simmons: Yes. It is reasonably comfortable even on a very hot day like today I guess. We found in our survey that not enough schools, about 75 per cent, had really taken those issues on board. There are also issues around the toxicity of materials on which I am not an expert but the BRE would be and many materials used in building are not necessarily tested to see whether, for example, they provoke asthma and so on. There are several dimensions to the materials' issue. I guess BRE would be more of an expert than I am on the subject. Q203 Chairman: BRE? Mr Simmons: Building Research Establishment as was; they are now called BRE. They actually developed BREEAM. Q204 Mr Marsden: That is all very important and very helpful but the issue I was also trying to press out of you was that there was accumulated knowledge of teachers, classroom assistants of what works and what does not work in terms of materials in buildings. Maybe if some of them had been taken on board in the mid to late 1960s we would not have had some of the problems of flat roofs and everything that we know about. What are the processes that are going into building schools for the future that will allow those people and those groups and the user groups themselves, the children, to have a say and say they do not want one like the one that was built down the road five years ago because the materials were rubbish. Mr Simmons: They are limited. Mr Goddard: Limited in that sense; very, very patchy. We heard earlier as well, that the whole feedback loop is weak. When you asked Richard to name and shame, organisations like CABE and we have tried to focus on the good practice. That is a way in terms of materials, in terms of what we put out there in partnership with the DfES, but there is no one central place where you can go and actually ask what the best range of materials is, for instance for natural ventilation. I am not aware of it but it may be somewhere like the BRE and it may be other organisations as well. No, there is not one location to go for that information, as far as I know. Q205 Chairman: Is there sharing of information? Teachers' TV is taking great interest in the proceedings of this and trying to involve teachers. We went to one of the London academies in Bermondsey and they do not have automatic lighting that cuts off as people leave the room "Because one of the senior staff had worked in schools which had it. Because the technology is not ready yet. If you want schools where the light comes on all night and the caretaker gets rung up and so on, you go for that technology". So they did not have it. We have been to other schools where we say "Why did you not have this sustainable element built in? "Because people said the technology was not ready or it would be 10 per cent more expensive or we had to cut costs". That kind of feedback is very important in materials, is it not? Mr Simmons: Yes, we certainly found that in some of the schools we looked at that there were problems where they have fitted that kind of equipment, then could not dim the lights in the classroom so their visualisers were not effective. My colleague, Marie Johnson, who is the architect who works on this project, has just reminded me of two things really. The first is that sustainability is not really well specified in briefs at the moment or in the building bulletins in the DfES and that is partly because a lot of the thinking on the subject is developing very rapidly. We found that quite a few people who had had environmental management systems built into their schools - and we found this by the way in all sorts of buildings, not just schools - did not really understand them and could not use them properly and they were too complex for them. Chairman: David wants to ask you some questions on that but let us finish this session on sustainability. Q206 Mr Chaytor: This is the area I should like to ask about and first of all come back to my earlier question to the previous witnesses about the BREEAM standards. Am I right in thinking that the BSF schools have to conform to the BREEAM rating of "very good"? Mr Simmons: That is correct, yes. Q207 Mr Chaytor: But to reach that standard, you do not have to score highly across all the criteria. Is this a weakness in the system and what would it take in terms of effort, imagination and cost to reach the BREEAM "excellent" standard, which is their highest standard? Mr Simmons: To save the Committee's time, we have suggested that the DfES needs to look very hard at this but actually the Sustainable Development Commission have put in evidence on this subject which I would not really argue with and they have gone into quite a lot of depth on BREEAM, so it may be that you want to read that. I am not sure whether you have seen the SDC evidence yet. Q208 Mr Chaytor: I have not read the SDC evidence. Mr Simmons: They put in quite a lot of evidence on BREEAM and it is not something that we would particularly depart from. We certainly think a long hard look is needed because the other thing about BREEAM and one of the documents we put in for you is this Scottish document, Sustainability - Building our Future Scotland's School Estate, which is an attempt to develop a vision for sustainability and looks at a wide range of issues including things like how food is sourced for the school canteen. It looks at the broad local agenda 21-type definition of sustainability which BREEAM does not really do. We should certainly say there is a broader set of issues to be considered as well as those that BREEAM covers. Q209 Mr Chaytor: From your response there and the previous set of responses, is it your feeling that environmental sustainability is not as high up the agenda in terms of the DfES's thinking on the BSF programme as it should be? Mr Simmons: They have started to work on it. They have put a set of initial guidelines on Teachernet on how to start thinking about sustainability in schools right the way from developing new schools through to the curriculum and teaching. They are not as far advanced yet as either the Scots or people in continental Europe. What we actually found in our survey was that the history of what has happened so far is not that promising and probably a lot more guidance is called for. Q210 Mr Chaytor: This was of 54 schools. Mr Simmons: Fifty-two schools. We have found that about three quarters of them have not really, for example, looked as closely as they should have done at things like passive ventilation, that they did have building control systems that were too complex for them, that they have not really taken a broad view of sustainability. To be fair, we did not have time or the resources to look into the actual energy costs, so I cannot speak about those. Q211 Mr Chaytor: I am not arguing that that is one of the single biggest factors that should be taken into account in terms of the lifecycle cost of the building. Mr Simmons: Absolutely; yes. We looked at the physical design of the buildings and whether or not we thought they would minimise it but, for example, you can meet the specification on lighting standards in the classroom entirely with artificial lighting. We did come across one school where the library has no windows at all, but it meets the lighting standards because it is fluorescent lit and yet there are ways of designing classrooms where you can get roof lighting and windows down one side which will give you good natural daylight across the whole classroom without creating too much heat gain and so on and there are good example of schools which have done that. The issue for CABE, as it is on many other things, is consistency. We should like to see consistent performance standards and consistent specifications. Q212 Mr Chaytor: Is that not the purpose of the BREEAM standards? Is it not the function of the Building Research Establishment to be the national centre for good practice in these areas and it is amazing that we are so way, way behind? Mr Simmons: They provide some very good advice on the subject but the question is whether it is built into the briefs sufficiently and with enough force to ensure it gets delivered. Q213 Mr Chaytor: What is holding it back? The local education partnerships are the forum in which these issues should be discussed between the client and the contractor. Is it the natural conservatism amongst builders and construction companies that they do not want to grapple with these issues or is it the weakness of guidance from the DfES or weakness of the prioritisation from the DfES? What are you saying is the source of the trouble? Mr Simmons: When I talked to the head teacher of the Jo Richardson school who had had the school built by Bouygues, they used a system of mass concrete, if I may use a piece of jargon; they built the school principally out of concrete and they have natural ventilation and so on. He said that they were first class and this is what they wanted to do, this is how they wanted to build a school, so I cannot say it is necessarily the contractors, but it may be falling between stools. The other thing is that there is an evolution going on at the moment. We started with a PFI process, which left the private sector to do most of the innovation and left them with a good deal of freedom and did not specify too much. We are now moving --- Q214 Mr Chaytor: It also left the school with the bill. If the original design brief had not built in energy efficiency, the school budget was landed with the bill of the higher energy costs. Mr Simmons: Yes, because they had to pay the contractor to go on providing facilities, management and so on. I do not mean to sound completely negative here, because we are learning; certainly DfES and Partnerships for Schools are learning from this. They have broadened the procurement process but they do now have a working party looking at standards. Coming back to the point about materials that was made earlier, they are trying to learn and this working party which my colleague Marie Johnson sits on is looking at ways of specifying robust materials and ones that will be more sustainable in the future. There is a lot of learning going on at the moment. Q215 Mr Chaytor: Would it be fair comment to say that the BSF programme had been launched without sufficient thought being given to the impact on the carbon footprint certainly or the wider environmental implications of rebuilding the nation's secondary schools? Mr Simmons: That is quite a hard question to answer. Q216 Mr Chaytor: Yes or no would do. Mr Simmons: You could answer it yes or no. I was just thinking about the experience we have observed in continental Europe and there is certainly a lot of experience out there that we could learn from, but you do have to start somewhere. In a sense the reason we are having this hearing is because the BSF programme exists and that is causing everyone to look at the whole thing and it is by no means too late to make sure that these things get built into the process because we are still at the moment developing the local education partnerships. Chairman: This is why we need you, because we want to learn from this experience of the last five years that we have looked at. We also want to use the laboratory of the academy programme which has 24 or 25 schools built. This Committee want to learn how we can improve things by coming up with a report that adds value. We need your help and cooperation on that. Q217 Mr Chaytor: You have raised the problem of lack of capacity to measure the changes to energy usage. Should smart meters be compulsory in any BSF school? Is there an argument against not building in smart meters from day one? Mr Simmons: I should look at a way in which everybody in the school can get some feedback on what is going on, whether it is smart meters or more holistic systems a look at the whole environment of the school. People ought to know what their school is consuming and, going back to the engagement of young people, they really care about this and they really want to know why their school is not having a positive effect on the planet. This is something which they care very deeply about and giving them opportunity to look at that. It could also be built into the curriculum, simple things which can be built into the maths curriculum now. We have seen a couple of schools where that kind of information is something which they can use in the maths curriculum. It is very directly relevant and kids can see the effect it is having. Mr Goddard: To try to answer the question you have asked a couple of times, what worries us is whether current policy and practice allow us to build good sustainable schools. We welcomed your Select Committee inquiry because there were lots of noises from all over the country and from different sectional interests about what was happening around sustainability. For us, the Department for Education and Skills need to be praised for putting sustainability on the agenda. I have a batch of information here trying to define sustainability, trying to share good practice. For instance, going back to an earlier question, you talked about extended schools before and we have just written for the DfES Designing for Extended Services. There is a willingness within the Department for Education and Skills and indeed within Partnerships for Schools, but we do need to step back and partly what you are attempting to do is to cut through a mass of all sorts of details to see where the conflicts are. If you talk to industry, what they say is that it is very, very difficult within this bidding process to put what could be initially expensive sustainability themes within that building. No-one is prepared to take the risk because it is a commercial process, it is rather frenzied and people are bidding against one another, supply chain against supply chain for quite valuable, big prizes. There has to be an inducement for those people to use their great skills to innovate. Q218 Chairman: Shall we slow the whole process down? Mr Goddard: No. Q219 Chairman: Why not? Most of us who have been around a reasonable amount of time know that if there is enormous activity in the construction world, then resources become very scarce, very scarce craftsmen, very scarce managers, very scarce construction companies with good records of building decent buildings. If you do all this in too much of a hurry, are we not creating a kind of boom where there is a greater scarcity than we need? We could take a more measured time to do all this. Mr Goddard: I and a number of other more expert people have wrestled with the whole issue of slowing it down, but if you go to schools, as all of you will in your constituencies and elsewhere, there is a need to get on and replace those buildings. There is a worry that it is taking too long already and that worries people in terms of momentum that is needed. Q220 Chairman: Can Richard tell me whether the industry has the capacity? Mr Simmons: The most recent studies suggest it probably has, yes. There have been some studies recently which the Construction Industry Council has undertaken, which suggest they can actually manage the BSF construction. Q221 Mr Marsden: Was that before or after we had won the Olympics? Mr Simmons: The Olympics are actually a fairly minor blip on a much larger construction programme. What is going on in the private sector in terms of construction --- Q222 Chairman: The Olympics will be a construction blip? Mr Simmons: Yes. At no point, as far as I know, do the Olympics employ the number of people on site that Terminal 5 at Heathrow is employing. Q223 Chairman: That is the biggest construction site in Europe, is it not? Mr Simmons: Yes. We can provide you with some data on this, if you like, which is supplied by others. "Blip" is the wrong word, because it is obviously a very important project and it has to be built on time and budget and so on. However, it is actually fairly small compared with the massive programme that we see in hospitals and schools and the private sector in particular at the moment. All the research suggests that the industry has the capacity to deliver it. In a sense the area of greatest concern is probably around the most skilled parts of the business, things like architects, landscape designers and so on, where there are probably going to be scarcities. It may well be that the area we have been talking about, good designers, is where the biggest risks lie. Q224 Chairman: This is so interesting that we are going past our usual time but we have to draw to a close. Ty, a quick response and then David is going to finish off. Mr Goddard: In terms of what we have seen around the country, there has been no lack of people coming forward who want to build new schools. Q225 Chairman: Yes, but that could include the man who used to be in Fawlty Towers whom Basil Fawlty used to employ. Do you remember him? Mr Goddard: I remember him and I remember watching him when I was a young person and thinking that I never wanted to stay in that hotel. I have probably stayed in lots of them since then; so have you. Richard has probably slapped a CABE enforcement notice on one. What I have learned - and you know this already and I am sorry to reiterate it - is that schools move at different paces and so do local education authorities. What we have is the beginnings of the sharings of good practice around what sustainability means. I have to echo what Richard said earlier, that we have to make sure that what we give schools is not bolted on but is owned. For us, the best way of owning innovation is not by being given a Powerpoint by your assistant director, or your director of children's services with the next new revolution on the horizon that you have to follow as a stressed head teacher, as a stressed teacher, but to be involved in that process. It is a process of negotiation and what worries me - and I think this is where you wanted us to get to, cut the flim-flam, get to the lessons - is that there has to be a minimum standard of engagement of our workforce and of our future citizens, both in sustainability and in all of the other issues around schools. The big question - and it is a massive question - is whether BREEAM helps sustainability. Do the area guidelines help sustainability? Do building bulletins as they are currently written here and now actually help sustainability? If you hear the voices out there, there are differing views on whether there are indeed conflicts within building bulletins. Some of the building bulletins, if you listen to the real technical expertise out there, which we need in our schools, actually contradict your journey, my journey towards sustainability. That has to worry us all. What I shall say is let us have a good sharp look, a good quick review, if such is possible, of the building bulletins and indeed the area guidelines, but also, another voice we hear from local education authorities or children's services departments, is time and time again national government put new agendas on them: Every Child Matters, Extended Schools, Children's Trusts, Sustainability could be one of those pressures they perceive. However, often there is a funding gap. Does the funding from central government actually take into account what could be short-term more expensive investment which actually may cut energy consumption by 30 to 50 per cent over a whole life cycle of a building? I fear that short-term investment we so desperately need is not actually covered by the investment framework at this particular moment. Q226 Mr Chaytor: There are certain things such as the thermal insulation value of concrete or the capacity to use natural daylight, which are well known and well understood and presumably cheaper than sticking on a photovoltaic roof. Why are these not used as a matter of course? That is my first question and my final question is: if the picture you have created for us in the industry is no shortage of builders but a looming shortage of designers and architects, is that a recipe for disaster? Is it not a case for using standardised models more frequently than having bespoke schools in every neighbourhood of the country? Mr Simmons: Coming to the standardisation point first, standards and standardisation are not quite the same thing. Setting standards and providing standardised products have their place, but certainly CABE will always say that you should also try to have a school which is right for your locality and every site is different as well. You may be talking about a community school or one which has just been used for school purposes. Standards and standardisation have their place and certainly if you can get to a point where you standardise standards for a reasonable amount of things, that frees your designer time to look at things like innovation and sustainability. As to why it is not happening: firstly it is about specifications and what is in the building bulletins. Secondly, it is about how projects are appraised and assessed. The Treasury and the Office of Government Commerce have published the common minimum standard and they require whole-life costing to be taken into account. That is an obligation. It is mandatory on all central government funding now, but it is not very widely known at the moment that that is the case. There is very clear guidance that whole-life costing should be used. The BRE have actually produced some guidance on how to do whole-life costing for schools but, as we argue in our report, that really needs to be looked at very hard and there needs to be a very sound assessment of the whole-life cost which allows you to look at the issues you were just talking about. In a sense we should like to start by following the Government's guidelines. It is great that the Government have actually taken that initiative. I have been in meetings with people from the Treasury and from government departments where the Treasury have said they insist on whole-life costing and that is how they want to see it done. Whether the budgets which are available then measure up to the whole-life costs is another matter entirely and that is something you have to ask DfES and the Treasury I guess. Chairman: This has been a long session but an excellent session. We have really started to get some reasonable information. You have both been very useful in that and thank you very much for your time. As you go away, whether you go on public transport or however you get home - I am sure you are going to be cycling knowing the commitment to sustainability of both of you - could you think about what we did not ask you, what you should have told us and remain in communication with us, because we are going to need your help to make this an excellent inquiry? Some of the things you have told me today make me think we had better finish this and get it out as quickly as possible. Thank you. |