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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1150-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COmmittee
SUSTAINABLE SCHOOLS
WEDNESDAY 1 nOVEMBER 2006 DR STEWART DAVIES, MR ALAN YATE, MR STAN TERRY and MR MARTIN MAYFIELD
MR CHRIS ARCHER, MS CAROLINE MORLAND and MR JIM BURKE Evidence heard in Public Questions 450 - 602
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 1 November 2006 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Jeff Ennis Paul Holmes Helen Jones Fiona Mactaggart Mr Gordon Marsden Stephen Williams ________________ Memoranda submitted by Sustainable Development Commission and Head Teachers and Industry
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Stewart Davies, Business Commissioner, Sustainable Development Commission UK (SDC), Mr Alan Yate, BREEAM Technical Director, Building Research Establishment, Mr Stan Terry, Environmental Consultant, Head Teachers and Industry (HTI), and Mr Martin Mayfield, Associate Director, Arup, gave evidence. Q450 Chairman: I welcome our witnesses today, Martin Mayfield, Stewart Davies, Stan Terry and Alan Yate and say thank you very much for the giving of your time to come before this Committee. I know that we have the power to persuade you to come if that was necessary, but it is always nice when people come on a voluntary basis. This is a very important inquiry for us. As you know as well as we do, £42 billion of our country's money, taxpayers' money, is going to be spent on building schools for the future. We actually want to make them schools we can be proud of and that will be appropriate in their design and everything else for the 21st century and, with the backdrop of the publication of the Stern Report this week, I think all of us have sharpened our interest in all things sustainable. We really want to get as much as we can out of this session. May I thank in particular Martin Mayfield from Arup who I think was dropped into this by two colleagues we met recently. We said, "What you have been telling us is so interesting, would you like to come and give evidence to the Committee?" and they said, "We would not but we have a member of our staff, a colleague, who is much better than we are". So, you were rather dropped into it. We welcome Stewart Davies from the Sustainable Development Commission and thank you very much for your briefing; it was extremely useful. Stan Terry is from HTI (Head Teachers and Industry) and Alan Yate from BREEAM. May I begin the questioning by saying to you, Stewart Davies, here we are perched ... well, I say "perched" but we have begun. We went to a school in Elsea ten days ago and we were told that they had suddenly been chosen to be in the programme. They were more or less told, "You have hardly any time at all. You have to start this whole process yesterday". We said, "Everyone tells us that the school should be fully engaged, the students, the staff, the support staff, everyone should be engaged in this process of deciding on design and so on" and they said, "Well, no time". Is that typical or is the slower, more gradual approach more typical? Dr Davies: I have certainly heard that same story, that the actual processes of procuring and agreeing the specification for schools somehow ends up in a mad rush where it is not absolutely clear who the ultimate client is between local authority, head teacher, partnership for schools and so on, and that the timescales can seem incredibly rushed. The point I would make in response to your question is that key to getting sustainable schools is to get the right fundamental structure designed in. This is not really about bolt-on windmills and so on, it is about getting a fundamental construction that is a resource efficiency. Getting that design process right, having the client interaction right and having the right information and time for that have been less than adequate. Q451 Chairman: Why is there this inadequacy? There is a first wave, is there not? We have interviewed some of the first wave schools and their partners. Why is it that we are not giving people enough time? Who is not giving the schools enough time? Dr Davies: I am going to run out of detailed knowledge of that but it is certainly coming about through the bidding process that is somehow compressing that time allowed for client and designer interactions. Q452 Chairman: Do any of our witnesses this morning know why we have this truncated period of time? Mr Terry: The reality is that head teachers would love to have new schools built and therefore they are very keen on the idea of having a new school built and I think the truncation occurs because it can be circumvented. You can come in with a proposal and people say, "Thank you very much, I would love to have that", but they do not actually spend the time getting the process right at the front end because time equals money and there is a kind of urgency factor that is built in to try and move this agenda forward. Certainly some of the evidence is that, in the initial phase schools, they are not necessarily fit for purpose because they have not actually spent time talking with who the real client is and I think you made the point that who the client being very often clouded. The client should be the school/head teacher and the community which it is part of. Q453 Chairman: Dame Ruth Silver, the Principal of Lewisham College, last night said to me that, when she heard that we had been looking at the FE sector, she said, "What our principals in the FE sector need to be taught is to be good clients". I said, "Ruth, 50 per cent of the estate has been renewed already; it is quite late on in the process". Are you telling me that we are too late to save the sustainability and the good design of the first wave? Mr Terry: I do not think that it is too late, I think the issue is that, in terms of school leadership teams for example, you have to train those clients. I know that the National College for School Leadership is in the process of developing a programme at this time which is being trialled at the present moment and is going to be run out next summer depending on how it is evaluated, and that is going to be developing things for those leadership teams in schools. Q454 Chairman: But no school has yet been built under the programme, has it? Mr Terry: No. Mr Mayfield: The majority are under contract or at the preferred bidder stage on the wave one projects. Q455 Chairman: Martin, would you say that it is too late to make sure that they are of good design and sustainable? Mr Mayfield: Yes. Q456 Chairman: Yes? Mr Mayfield: Because the requirements that the bidders have been asked to fulfil do not reflect a sustainable level of development. They reflect at best very good or possibly excellent BREEAM which is an incremental step in building standards but go nowhere near as far as they need to go to achieve a sustainable level of development. Q457 Chairman: Alan, would you agree with that? Mr Yate: I would agree with that. The issue really is that it is down to the basic inherent quality of the initial thought process in the design and we need to start getting the inherent nature of the building design sorted earlier on in the procurement process. If you then come in at a later stage, you are tinkering around the edges. I would suggest that there probably is some scope to make some improvements to the first wave but you are not going to achieve very high levels of performance over and above those that are currently in the contract. Q458 Chairman: Let us take a real school in a real first wave. Who are the villains here? Are there any villains or is it all poor leadership that is shared amongst contractors, clients, heads and the Government? Who is to blame for this? This is going off half cock, is it not? Mr Mayfield: Yes. There is a balance of the methods of incentivisation and the standards which people are holding up as good standards and high standards. There are also elements of contradiction between the relevant building bulletins which are acknowledged within the marketplace but also drive towards solutions which are inherently higher in terms of carbon emissions occasionally and do not drive in a clear --- Q459 Chairman: Can you explain to me what these building bulletins are. Mr Mayfield: Building bulletins were originally produced by DfEE as guidance for school designers. So, they were produced as guidance documentation but they are now used within the BSF environment as benchmarking and in a much more legislative manner. They are giving standards rather than guidance, so the language of them is not quite right. For instance, there are guidance notes on acoustics, on energy, on IT, on lighting and so on and, whilst there have been some efforts to move these forward and coordinate them ... For instance, the acoustic guideline drives for a very high level of acoustic quality which drives for buildings to be sealed, which drives for buildings to be air conditioned and the carbon emissions of an air conditioned building is around double that of a naturally ventilated building. So, it is pushing it in the wrong direction for good reasons but there are contradictions there which need to be addressed. Q460 Chairman: How do we make the best of the situation now? How do we learn from these mistakes, this early wrong start? How do we put it right? Dr Davies: I would start with being very clear about what the deliverables of the programme are in terms of sustainability because that has yet to be properly researched and mapped out. I think getting a clear link from the Government's stated policy to how much sustainable development improvement this programme --- Q461 Chairman: The people in the DfES do not know anything about this. They are civil servants, for God's sake! Arup is one of the leading names in engineering and in construction. You are the expert. Your Commission are the experts. You guys are the experts. Civil servants will by and large be led and guided by you. We are going to wait a long time for some expert on sustainability in the department, are we not? After all, they work in a greenhouse! It must be one of the worst buildings in London! Come on, where is the leadership? You are not going to get it from the department, surely. Dr Davies: If there were a defined task to do that mapping, I think it could be well led by DfES but with support from experts. Q462 Chairman: How do we get that kind of quality of knowledge and leadership in the department? Who gives it to them? Who physically goes into that building and says, "This is the way. We will all sit around this table and we are going to sort this out"? Who should be at the table? Mr Mayfield: I think that there is a need for a clear understanding of what we are trying to achieve, which is technically there. I am afraid that I have not written anything for today but I have read the SDC1 and I think that there are some very good statements in here about where we should be going. We should be quite clear about what we are trying to achieve and then that should be held up as BREEAM excellent or as whatever we choose to define it and then we can work away from that. At the moment, we are working down from where we are. We need to work away from where we need to be, not from where we are. So, there needs to be a clear set of standards developed, which I think is quite easy to do. For the wave one projects which have been built it is too late, but what we must make sure of is that the future schemes developed through the wave one relationships do not suffer the same fate because there is pressure now on a number of projects to deliver the next set of schools and the next set of schools and the next set of schools rather than saying, "Hang on a minute, what are we really trying to achieve here?" Q463 Chairman: Alan, if you were advising the department, what should they do? Mr Yate: I think the most important thing is to learn the lessons and to make sure that you have a good feedback mechanism from that first plan. Q464 Chairman: We have already built how many academies? You would have thought, here is a laboratory to try this stuff out. Did no one in the department actually look at the academy programme? How many are we up to? I see Philip Green Fashion Academies. I think we are in the mid-thirties and they are up and running, they have been designed and built. Mr Yate: Yes. Q465 Chairman: Did no one from the department go round and say, "The most sustainable and the model that we should learn from are these"? Mr Yate: I think that there has been some review of what has happened, but I do not think that there has been a coordinated gathering of that feedback from past experience. If we are to ensure that the later phases of the BSF programme achieve the sorts of standards that we perhaps all would like them to achieve, then let us use that and have a really coordinated effort to collect that feedback. We can debate whether the standards are the right standards or not, but the practicality and the experience of actually putting those existing standards into practice ... It is very easy to set environmental standards; we could all advise on setting those and we could get some wonderfully high level standards. At the end of the day, like most things in life, this is a matter of priorities and where you set the balance between very high environmental performance standards and the other aspects of sustainability in terms of costs, in terms of social impact and so on. Those all need to be balanced. In terms of what the Government need to do, they need to provide that set of priorities to the programme. We are sustainability experts predominantly in terms of the environmental side, certainly the BRF side, but really to input into the process and to advise the department on setting appropriate standards and achievable standards on the environmental side, there needs to be that sort of political decision in terms of priorities. Q466 Chairman: It is a little depressing, is it not? Here we are on course to spend £42 billion pounds of taxpayers' money and you are saying that we are not doing it right. Mr Terry: I am not sure that spending £42 billion/£45 billion on new schools necessarily fell within a kind of sustainability envelope initially with the idea of building the new schools; sustainability has come on board in the process. I wonder about a government which is spending that amount of money but not making demands on the construction industry by saying, "You must do this". I look at the study that WRAP did, the Davis Langley study, which actually identified that you could put up to 30 per cent of recycled material into new building, new school buildings in this sense, and it would not impact on cost. The Partnership for Schools has reduced the level to 10 per cent. Why? I think they identified in that study that you could save up to 4,000 tonnes of waste material going to landfill, but they have opted for a lower standard. I do not understand why because I am not involved at that level, but I would like to see who made that decision. Q467 Chairman: We have Partnership for Schools coming to see us and we might ask them questions about that. Martin, you are the lone industry person here in a sense. Is it partly your fault? Should a company of your quality or Skanska who have given evidence not come before the Committee and say, "Look, this is what we want. Please, build us something"? If they said, "Look, we want this, we don't want any of the recycled stuff", surely it is up to you to have said, "No, no, no. You want sustainability. This is what adds up to sustainability". Mr Mayfield: I think that there is a moral dilemma for us because the construction market is driven by the needs that are presented in front of it to build these things as quickly as possible to move forward the agenda and there has not been enough time given to understand what is sustainable. I think that the marketplace is capable of delivering. There are not good examples in the UK; there are good examples globally - Scandinavia is one place to look - but I think that the marketplace is responding to the agenda that is placed in front of it. Q468 Chairman: You work all over the world. You helped build this building and this is supposed to be sustainable. Mr Mayfield: Yes and it is. Keeping it to BSF, I think that the construction firms, particularly the international ones, can deliver this. However, they are not being presented with the right set of hierarchical needs to enable them to focus on these issues and they are not being given time to do them in the BSF process either because it is far too quick. I have personally been party to schemes where we have tried to do as much as we can within cost and tied envelopes and we know that the winning schemes have not done as much but have given a bit more area or a bit more this or a bit more that and it has been pushed by the wayside. The agenda is moving quite quickly which is helping but historically it has not. There are schemes on site now and in design that have no level of climate change resilience and if we even hit the medium/low climate change scenario, those schools will need air conditioning over their design life. So, their carbon emissions will go up over their design life, not down. There has not been clarity of requirements coming out to allow somebody to say, "Actually, that works and that does not". Q469 Chairman: How many schools are in the first wave? Does anyone know? I do not think we have had that evidence given, have we? Mr Yate: There is evidence that has been talked about here regarding the time envelope, actually doing the research. There is evidence in the States that shows that naturally ventilated buildings improves student performance, so it should be one of the strict criteria that says that is what you build. However, if we are building schools which have to be sealed because of the criteria and therefore have to have air conditioning and part of that is that we are putting a lot of money into ICT but that generates heat in itself and increases the amount of energy use that has been ... There needs to be a much clearer image of what we are trying to achieve in terms of sustainability built into the process and I do not think that it exists at the moment. Q470 Chairman: Should we slow the whole process down so that we get it right? Dr Davies: I would suggest that there needs to be some really smart and intensive thinking but I do not think any results in necessarily a slower and deliverable, or probably very deliverable but it might mean some very fast and deep thinking at this upfront stage. Mr Yate: And making sure that you pull together and think through the linkages between different initiatives/different pushes that are being made. Due to the speed of the programme and because of the pressures on the construction industry and so on, there is a strong move towards what is known as modern ethics of construction, a very broad range of construction techniques, but there is very little experience of how those actually perform in use. A significant number of those are relatively light weight construction techniques and that raises questions over the adaptability of those buildings into the future. For example, the issue of needing air conditioning. If you have a building which is very light weight, then it will not be able to absorb higher temperatures to the same degree and you are much more likely perhaps to need a building system in there which is an energy using system that will air condition that environment, so air conditioning and therefore higher carbon emissions as a result. It is thinking through the balance between all these different messages that the construction industry has been given. Dr Davies: I want to make it very clear that this is not one of the situations where the step into sustainability is being done with the supplying industry kicking and screaming. In fact, quite the opposite. I spent quite a lot of time as the Sustainable Development Commissioner talking to the industry. It is the other way round. There is frustration that there is not the clear prioritisation of sustainability because the industry knows how to deliver it because of its own CSR and wants to actually be seen to deliver sustainable schools. Chairman: Thank you for those initial answers. Let us move on and broaden the questioning but still talking about sustainability. Q471 Paul Holmes: Is this not all very alarming? In some of the earlier evidence sessions we have had, we have heard that a lot of the new wave of schools are not very good as educational places to work in and learn in and now we are hearing from you that also they are not actually very sustainable either, even that they are going to be less sustainable than what they are replacing. The Government have launched a sustainable schools strategy this year and they have said that care for the environment will be second nature to all the pupils in the new school building programme, yet the evidence seems to be quite the opposite. The Sustainable Development Commission has said that the Government have not thought it through, they do not know whether the new schools estate will mean higher or lower carbon emissions or what the impact will be on water demand, waste production and traffic. This is very worrying. It is more than worrying, it is a disaster, is it not? Dr Davies: It is a clear opportunity to do a lot better and it really does start with that mapping of the policy through to delivery in setting a vision of what is going to be the contribution of this programme to carbon reduction. Schools are 15 per cent of the public sector's carbon footprint. There is a tremendous opportunity in this programme to demonstrate through leadership how that can be reduced through good construction. Q472 Paul Holmes: What would be the key features in a list of five, shall we say, of what should be a sustainable school? What are the most important things? Dr Davies: Before I come on to the bricks and mortar, what we are looking for is something with the minimum environmental footprint but the maximum environmental mind print, as I call it. There is a tremendous impact here to affect the way that children who will soon be adults and who will soon be consumers think about the world. I had the opportunity yesterday to visit a primary school in Hadley where a lot of the inherent structure has been got right: there is the natural lighting and there is the natural ventilation. Yes, there is a window but there is a green roof and so on. That has a tremendous educational impact on the kids and it is integrated in their curriculum. That is all absolutely fabulous and there are a few beacons there of good practice. In terms of what the features should be - and we have mentioned some of them already - there should be as much natural lighting and natural ventilation as possible, probably something around the thermal mass so that we are proofed against the climate change and we will not be tipped into air conditioning and the high carbon footprint. I think that the very important one is on site electricity generation, whether that is windmill, solar or whether it is biomass or indeed whether it is even quite old-fashioned technology in terms of gas power combined heat and power where there is a tremendous carbon saving from generating electricity locally in a school. That would be my list but I am sure that my colleagues here would have another list. Mr Mayfield: There is a standard for space utilisation in schools, BB98, which defines what all the size and spaces are and that sets quite a rigid framework for school designs. So, you get a school with X size for X number of pupils. If that could be turned away or reconsidered, there is the opportunity to lengthen the educational day and reduce the size of the school by 10 or 15 per cent. If you can reduce the size of the school and spend the money that you were going to spend on that extra bit of school, you are making the building that is left perform better and I think that is something that is worth serious consideration. Ban air conditioning is an easy one. Develop the schools so that they do not use power in its neutral state. So, when they need heating, a bit of heating in the winter and possibly a bit of cooling in the summer if it is absolutely unavoidable but not sort of default winter to heavy engineered solutions. There are a number of solutions that can work. The buildings that look sustainable will be radically different architecturally and in operation to the schools we have seen today. You cannot design that school in a manner and tweak it because there is such a fundamental difference between where we are and where we need to be. I think that there has to be an acceptance that these things will look and operate massively differently. On the windmill side, I agree with the educational side of wind turbines but a 1.5 kilowatt wind turbine is a seventh as effective as a 1 megawatt wind turbine. You spend seven times as much money doing that to get the same carbon reduction. There is an educational benefit to it but the fundamental difference we need is a low carbon infrastructure to support low carbon buildings. The buildings cannot do it on their own. Mr Terry: The real issue here is that we are building schools in which future generations are going to be educated and all those schools are at the heart of their communities. If you build a school which conforms with sustainability principles and the curriculum is designed to emphasise those kind of approaches, then children learn by kind of osmosis and they spread that message out in the community. It is difficult to change hearts and minds in the community and amongst businesses as well but the best way to do it is to deliver it through the educational experience that these children are having. Kids are great at picking up when you 'don't walk the talk'. If you are building a building and telling them about sustainability, they know that you are not operating in that way. The majority of schools do not think about their waste output; it all goes into the same bins. What is the point of trying to teach sewer separation to kids in a school throughout a lesson programme and then they watch the school throwing everything out into one bin? The lights stay on. Where I live near Aylesbury, I came back from the cinema last weekend via the brand new Aylesbury College which is being built and, at 11.30 at night, every single light in the building was on. It was like a beacon from the community - here we are! We are empty but all the lights are on! I do not understand why they do not operate on those kinds of principles. The LSE has said that colleges should operate within sustainability principles. Here is a brand new building which seems to be saying, "Up yours. We are going to do it the way we want to do it". Q473 Paul Holmes: On the renewable energy side taking into account the strictures about cost and everything, I have taught a number of pupils in different schools, both old ones and brand new ones, where they are very disappointed that they are having all these lessons and hearing all this from the Government and it is not in their school. We visited one of the academies in Southwark that has won the design award as the best one and the kids there were saying, "We have no solar panels, turbine windmills or whatever" and there is no way that you can monitor what the end use of the school is. They were quite despondent and that was a brand new state-of-the-art designed winning school. Dr Davies: Quite possibly, the ICT department needed a power station of its own to run it. Another feature of what people look for in sexy, new educational buildings is the big mass of PCs and the energy efficiency of those in the way they are set up. There is a right way to do it and there is a wrong way to do it and I am not sure the specification is right. Q474 Paul Holmes: What is the reason why that tends not to be there? Is it the cost factor because the architect argued, "We had to strip it out because of the cost" or is it the lack of regional guidance? Dr Davies: We have touched on this earlier. I think it is about the priority. If you want to build sustainable schools, that has to be the priority and you then have to work out how you optimise the financing of that to suit it. At the moment, we are working to a very old-fashioned financial model for the amount of money per square meter of school that has not taken account of the new urgency about building sustainable schools. Q475 Paul Holmes: On an issue such as the use of grey water and recycled water, what percentage of all these new schools that have been built at enormous expense to deliver this sustainability use grey or recycled water? Mr Mayfield: Grey water recycling is quite expensive but rain water reclamation is used reasonably often because it can be shown to pay for itself reasonably quickly. Of all the bolt-ons, it is the one that survives longest through the value engineering process. Q476 Paul Holmes: Out of, say, 50 new schools, how many have rain water? Mr Mayfield: Eight or ten would be a guess. Q477 Paul Holmes: So, less than 20 per cent? Mr Mayfield: Yes. Q478 Paul Holmes: Which again is not very good. My final question, which is certainly not a building feature, is that one of the things the Government said is that, as part of sustainable schools, we should encourage alternative transport, walking and cycling to school. On the other hand, they are encouraging schools to recruit their children from miles away and parents co-opt into schools that are miles away. Is that not totally contradictory from the point of view of what we are talking about? Mr Terry: From my point of view, if you have a local authority and it has to rationalise its educational provision when it is going to build a new school, it may need to close down several schools around and move it to a different site. The problem is that you are going to have to transport children to and from that site. Where I used to be in a rural community, you had to have public transport or private transport to get kids there, but that still meant that many, many parents travelled ten or 12 miles to get their kids to school. You have to think very carefully about where you are going to locate the school at the front end. If you are going down the road of saying, "We want to have local schools so that kids can cycle and walk to school", then you have to put that as one of your priorities. Q479 Paul Holmes: And that is not in any of the criteria? Mr Terry: I do not think so, no. Q480 Mr Marsden: Stewart, I wonder if I can come to you first. The evidence which you have given to the Select Committee was very strong and forceful regarding your concerns about the Government not having looked at the issue of high and low carbon emissions and you have said that this is extremely worrying. What level of engagement have you had with DfES in terms and I literally mean at what level? Have you been engaged on a regular basis with officials who are doing BSF? Has Alan Johnson or Jim Knight or Andrew Adonis had you in for a greater chat at any stage? The message we seem to be getting is that you and your colleagues and the other people here are putting out lots of good ideas but meanwhile the great Titanic, the DfES, is proceeding smoothly down a separate path and not really taking them on board. Is that a fair assessment or not? Dr Davies: I would like to take it in parts before I assess it as fair or not. I think that the doors are open and that there is constructive discussion going on. In fact, we have a secondee from the Sustainable Development Commission full time in DfES as part of our capacity building. I certainly would not position it as being barriers and rock throwing at all. It is not at that status. Clearly, it is not being influential enough in the ultimate priorities. Q481 Mr Marsden: You basically need to have certainly senior civil servants if not ministers prepared to sit down with you, even if it is only for half-an-hour, and talk through some of the inherent problems in what you are saying. Dr Davies: Yes. Mr Marsden: That is useful to know. I want to move on now to the issue of environmental sustainability as a whole. I went to two of my schools in Blackpool the other week, both of them in a different context: one is looking at a complete rebuild and one is looking at partial rebuild. Both the heads there said the same thing to me - "It is really exciting but it is really worrying because we do not know what we are going to want to put in our classrooms in ten or 15 years' time. One of them was old enough, as I am, to remember language laboratories. Language laboratories were the great thing of the future at one stage and we had all these old-fashioned tape machines and, within a few years, they were completely redundant because of technological change. There are similar issues in terms, I would suggest, of banks of computers, portable as opposed to fixed etc, etc. What is going in at the moment as part of BSF? Never mind the environmental sustainability at the moment, what is going in at the moment to make sure that the spaces that are created in classrooms under BSF will be fit for purpose given the school technologies and the possibilities of five, ten or even 15 years hence? Q482 Chairman: We must have shorter questions. I am trying to get in as many sustainability questions. Mr Mayfield: I have been doing some work and having some discussions with the major IT providers. BSF is a big deal for them; they are putting a lot of effort into it. The overriding view is that future ICT requirements will actually have a lesser impact on the building than historic ICT requirements. So, there is not too much concern. There is a great deal of debate over whether or not schools should have raised access floors throughout and the costs associated with that and there are other practical issues associated with it. In ICT terms, there is not a general concern and I would agree with that. We will see ICT start to disappear into the education process as the tools become smaller and easier and lower powered. Q483 Mr Marsden: Has that been factored into the tenders and you and colleagues are now agreeing with the DfES and individual schools? Mr Mayfield: The fact that it is of lower impact means that it does not necessarily have a cost. That is a kind of long-term view. There is a driver to increase the number of PCs per pupil which is increasing power demands and is increasing heat loads, so there is a potential that, over the next ten years, you will see a problem arising as there is more and more IT in schools, more and more air conditioning and so on and so forth before technology actually starts to drive that down again. Q484 Mr Marsden: Is there anything that we can do to close that gap? Mr Mayfield: Yes, building levels of climate change and ICT resilience into the BSF space because, if you overload climate change and ICT heat gains, you will find that some of the things that are being built today will not be fit for purpose. Dr Davies: I would like to make a brief comment on that. The improvements in energy efficiency in the buildings that have been a result of BREEAM coming in have actually been outweighed in carbon terms by the increase in electricity going into ICT. So, we have actually gone backwards. Mr Terry: And you have the issue of extended school days now as well. You have schools open from 8.00 in the morning until 10.00 at night 50 weeks of the year and there is going to be increasing community use on those kinds of facilities. You are going to have those facilities absorbing more energy continually from that point of view. Q485 Mr Marsden: Can I ask a question and perhaps, Alan, you would like to pick up on this. I am quite old fashioned about the way in which I look at these things and in one of the previous sessions I was a little concerned that no one at any point specifically mentioned materials, old-fashioned materials, in terms of sustainability. In your requirements under BREEAM, they do not talk about materials, do they? Mr Yate: Yes, they do. There is a whole section in BREEAM that looks at the issue of materials for key building elements on a life cycle basis, so it looks at the embodied impacts, that is a range of environmental impacts, of construction materials as they go into the building but then also as they are maintained --- Q486 Mr Marsden: You have eight different --- Mr Yate: It is one of the eight categories. Q487 Chairman: We are going to come on to BREEAM in a minute. Mr Yate: It is one of the categories. Q488 Mr Marsden: Can I ask a question finally about an issue about which we have already heard, the time gap. You are saying that your impression is that everything is powering ahead and that is one of the reasons why some of these issues cannot be taken into account by DfES and by schools, but I am led to understand that there are a number of authorities where BSF is already behind for a significant period of time. First of all, why is that, if they are powering ahead in the way that has been described and does that offer some opportunity for reflection? Mr Mayfield: Some are behind but the marketplace only gets to look at them once they come to the marketplace and the period of time that the market is then given to respond is not changing, be it 13, 16 or 17 weeks. It is how long they have to take the requirements of the council and come up with a response. So, even though they are drifting, that period of time is not changing. Q489 Mr Carswell: I heard you talk about contracts with the DfES and schools, but I wondered if you have ever thought - and this is perhaps a question more for Mr Terry - that maybe there is either too much or too little central guidance on this whole sustainability agenda. Do you sometimes think that there needs to be more guidance or do you sometimes think that actually maybe it should be left to the schools and maybe they could work out what really is sustainable in the context of their communities? Do you ever sometimes wonder why we national politicians are discussing building materials in local schools? Why do we have a national commission on this? That is food for thought. Mr Terry: My feeling is that we do not have a leadership group in the education profession who understand the principles behind this, so they need educating very rapidly. They are generally bright people and they can pick it up very quickly and they can ask the right kind of questions. If you have a client base which is not knowledgeable, it will be led by the professionals who will talk them into what they think would be a good solution. You have to be courageous as a head teacher in terms of asking the right kind of questions. Appearing stupid is not normally a head teacher's role. This is an important issue and I know that national colleges are now about to move forward on this agenda, but there is nothing inherent in the way in which we train our teachers, for example, through the leadership programmes that exist at the present moment. There is an optional unit leading from the middle, which is a training programme through the national college; there is one unit in the MPQH but it is an optional unit; there is nothing else that exists at the present moment. They are running hard to try and solve the problem. I think that you have to educate the client to be able to ask the right kind of questions and to actually have the kind of visioning view as to what they want from their schools. I think the issue you raised earlier on about what kind of schools we are going to have comes back to what we want in terms of the curriculum we are going to have in 15 years. That is a bit of an imponderable. So, it is delivering an envelope that actually fits what we might want to do. I think that you have to give people the opportunity to visualise where they would like to be and the kind of education process that they would like. Are we going to have boxes in 15 or 25 years' time? How are kids going to learn? Will they be in a classroom of 30 or are there going to be individualised learning programmes? Leadership teams in schools need to be able to thrash those kind of issues out and they need to be able to demand - perhaps that is the wrong word - by saying, "What we want from our new school for the future is this and you, the designer, and you, the company, can come up with the ideas that fulfil our dream". Dr Davies: I think that there is a balance to be struck. The head teacher is exactly the right person for making the decision with the leadership team locally about trade-offs and optimising the local situation. However, we should not be reinventing the wheel at that time. There is a huge inefficiency in a process where there are, in a sense, too many options, and I think that a degree of standardisation working on some clear goals from DfES about what sustainable schools look like would produce a best practice on that that would then present a more focused set of options to local leadership. Mr Mayfield: I do not think that we need any more guidance. What we do need is the correct setting of standards to what is sustainable and what is not. I think that there is enough paper around written about it. Q490 Chairman: Come on, that is the standard. Come on. Mr Mayfield: No, the standards that are given. Chairman: That is central direction. Douglas would hate that. You are going to say, "Within these parameters, you should work". Douglas is saying, why do you not let the local community and head get on with building ---? Q491 Mr Carswell: I assume that there will be a national curriculum in 15 years' time. Mr Terry: I would not see it as a problem in letting heads in their communities actually go forward on these programmes, but they have to have the basic understanding in order to make those kind of decisions. Q492 Chairman: No, no. Stan, you have to spell out what you mean by basic understanding. What Stewart is saying is a basic understanding and what Martin is saying is a basic understanding is very different, is it not? I take it that Alan would disagree with that too. He would want a different standard, whether he wants BREEAM or a super BREEAM, I do not know, but clearly from your evidence you submitted to the Committee you do want guiding. You do not want people not having sustainability knowledge at the local level. Dr Davies: Mandated into a standard and just let me make my reference to the sustainable procurement taskforce which provides some very valuable insight that is directly relevant to building schools for the future programme in terms of both specification but also particularly capability building and that would very much apply to --- Q493 Chairman: That relates to standards being about recycled material you could put in, etc, does it not? Dr Davies: Yes. Q494 Chairman: Martin, I jumped on you unfairly then. You are a sharp operator, are you not? You are Arup, you are big. I know that your work is co-op which is always rather nice to remember but you go in there and you could have a naïve head teacher who has never built a school. You can get away with anything, can you not? Mr Mayfield: We have moral obligations not to get away with anything! No, we win commissions because of our credentials and our abilities to produce more sustainable buildings. The problems we have is the datum which is out there. When we say to somebody, "Sustainability actually means this", it is so far removed from what today's expectations are in terms of how it looks, how it operates and how long it is going to build and everything else that it just gets thrown out. It is nowhere near the agenda. We are driving in that direction but we do not have a framework within which to say, "That works. That is what is required and that is the right standard". The standards that are set are too easy to achieve and do not reflect sustainable development. Mr Yate: Part of the reason why I think they are very easy to throw out is because the client, in terms of the school, the LEA and so on, do not feel that they understand the issues. In terms of needing additional guidance, I agree absolutely in terms of, we need guidance for those stakeholders in the process in order that they can ask the right questions and they can avoid having the wool pulled over their eyes. I also agree that I do not think the industry needs a lot more guidance in terms of how to meet the objective of more sustainable schools. What they need are clear performance standards and I absolutely agree that those need to be set at national level initially but with some degree of flexibility at a local level on some of the issues. Q495 Mr Carswell: It is an interesting answer but I am perplexed because you said that it has to be national standards. Why? Why can the local authorities in the town halls of Essex and Cornwall and London not decide these things? Mr Yate: For a start, they do not have the expertise, but potentially they could have the expertise. A lot of the issues are issues at a national level in terms of overall carbon emissions and in terms of materials procurement. It is not even a national issue, it is a European issue or indeed a global issue. So, allowing the decision making process to go right down to the very local level does not seem to make much sense in those areas. I think where I would agree that local priorities have to take over is when you start getting into issues, particularly issues of social sustainability in terms of the links of a school with the community, the whole extended school agenda. I think that sustainability is a very broad agenda. Q496 Mr Carswell: It begins to sound to me as if sustainability is a modern justification for more central Government. Mr Yate: I think it is simple, clear performance standards coming from the centre and then you allow local interpretation of that in terms of how those standards will be met, but you have to make sure that everyone involved in the process fully understands what those mean and part of the problem at the moment seems to me that the educational side does not understand. Your head teacher is not going to understand and we should not be expecting those sorts of people to understand the detailed technical balances that have to be taken account of. You are weighing up options. There is not a simple black and white solution to any of this which is why BREEAM as a method is set up in the way it is. Chairman: We have to move on because we have limited time. We would now like to look at the BSF process in detail. Q497 Stephen Williams: Following on from what Douglas was saying about involvement right down at the grass roots level, if I may begin with Dr Davies from the Sustainable Development Commission. You have recommended that various stakeholders should be involved in the design process of the school, which obviously would include the head teacher. What sort of other people should be involved at design process level? Dr Davies: If you take the head teacher and the leadership team who of course bring their community input as well because they are clearly major stakeholders for the school, then it is important that there is the right technical consistency and I think that the idea of having advisers and a supporting team for schools going through this process is keen and then there has to be the other stakeholders that are about the alignment with Government policy through the Department, the DfES. Q498 Stephen Williams: Is the head teacher the principal spokesperson for everyone involved at the professional level in the school or would you expect the designers and the architects to talk to the cook about the kitchens or the children about the playground and the corridors? Dr Davies: My experience in business as well as in the area of sustainability is that engagement brings great ideas from all sorts of unexpected places. I wholeheartedly recommend that engagement processes are set up that allow that to happen. Coming back to this issue of 13 to 18 weeks to get these decisions made and not all the information being available at the front of that period of time, engagement is largely squeezed out of the BSF process. Q499 Stephen Williams: As there is not enough time, do you think your recommendation in practice does not actually take place to the level you recommend? Dr Davies: Yes, absolutely. Q500 Stephen Williams: If you look at primary schools that probably litter all of our constituencies, certainly I have looked at primary schools in South Wales and they look remarkably similar to primary schools in Bristol that were put up in Victorian and Edwardian times, so there was a national model, if you like, of designs of primary schools in that period. Do we really need different schools to flourish in different ways in different parts of the country given that a level playing field in topography in 800 to 1,200 pupils? Can we not have a standard secondary school or do they all need to look different? Mr Mayfield: There are climatic differences across the country and those are going to change over the next 20/30 years. There are different solutions for different areas but there are overriding issues that do not change such as the relationship with the sun. All school buildings should have a relationship with the sun path, so you should be able to look at a school and know which way is south from the way that the school looks. So, there are some issues that are the same but there are regional climatic differences. Q501 Chairman: It rains everywhere in Britain! Mr Mayfield: Absolutely. Q502 Chairman: That is not going to change, is it? Your guys in your profession build flat roofs all over Yorkshire and Lancashire and probably in Scotland. They have leaked ever since. The Victorian schools did not have flat roofs and they do not leak and some of them are pretty darn sustainable today, are they not? Mr Mayfield: Well designed flat roofs can be a benefit. Q503 Chairman: Could you show us one? We would love to see one. Mr Mayfield: Yes, I can show you some schools with well designed flat roofs because, if the water sits on it, when the water evaporates, it takes heat away from the school. Q504 Chairman: Martin, you are being a bit ... No, you are not being disingenuous! Martin, you are suggesting that there is somewhere in the world that you know about the sustainable school. It is not in England, so we cannot see it easily, but could you point us to where this has developed in order that we could look at one? Mr Mayfield: I do not think that you can point to a sustainable school. I think that you can point to different schools that are responding to different climatic issues and, taken together, there are a set of principles. Q505 Chairman: If we locked you in a room for all the weekend, could you come up with a sustainable design that we could replicate all over Britain? That is what Stephen is asking. Mr Mayfield: Yes. However, a sustainable school is only as good as the infrastructure in which it sits. So, it will not get there on its own, it needs to be part of a waste, transportation and energy infrastructure that supports it in the right manner. So, yes, you could design a building that fits into that but not on its own. Well, you could but it would not be repeatable in a formal manner. Q506 Chairman: Would you measure the Victorian school? I went to a 1904 Edwardian school the other day and it seemed to be pretty sustainable to me. It was made of local brick; it had local tiles on the roof; it did not have any air conditioning; the children seemed to be reasonably well served in it; they did not have much of a playground which was the only downside. Are we in danger of trendy, fashionable buildings replacing buildings that are pretty sustainable anyway in terms of their carbon footprint? Mr Mayfield: I think that there is a lot to be learned from the past. I do not think that we need to start afresh, but those buildings are really poorly insulated, so the geometries of them are good and some of the materials are sustainable but there are things that need to be done to change that. I said before that a sustainable school will look radically different and it will. It will still look like a school but it will look radically different to the schools we have today. Q507 Stephen Williams: I turn to Mr Yate and talk about BREEAM. What does BREEAM actually tell us about a school because, as I understand it, there were nine factors but a school might not have to meet all of them? If a school meets with BREEAM criteria, what can we actually expect of it? Mr Yate: What BREEAM is trying to do is to provide an overall measure of environmental sustainability. It is not a full sustainability method; it is concentrated on the environmental aspect. It does that by evaluating performance against a wide range of issues in those issue categories that you have talked about and it brings all of that together into a single score, or a single rating, so that there is a clear message in terms of the overall impact of this building on the environment. What it does not do is to set specific standards against each individual area. There is an element of tradability in there which allows for taking account of the local context, it allows for the local priorities, the sort of local decision-making that was talked about earlier, flexibility in terms of design solutions, and so on, but it is really trying to provide this overall measure of environmental impact and it does that through a weighting system which takes account of the relative importance of each of the diverse issues that it looks at. Q508 Stephen Williams: Given this weighting system, suppose a school has been built on a brownfield site but the materials that were used to build it were not terribly good and it wasted a lot of water and it was badly insulated, could it still meet the criteria on average? Mr Yate: It will get some ticks in boxes in terms of its high selection but it will perform very badly in those other areas, and, because of the way the scoring system works, there is a lot more emphasis placed on what you might consider to be the key environmental impact, particularly in terms of CO2, which is 25 to 30 per cent of the overall score. So, it uses the weighting scoring system to place emphasis on the key areas. Q509 Stephen Williams: The expectation is that schools should aim for a "very good" BREEAM assessment or even an "excellent". Are there grades below that? Is there an adequate one or a good one? Mr Yate: There is a "pass", a "good", a "very good" and "an excellent". Q510 Stephen Williams: What sort of message does it send out to children and parents who go to a "pass" school under BREEAM as opposed to an "excellent" school? Mr Yate: None of the BSF schools should be "pass" because the requirement is for a "very good". Q511 Stephen Williams: The requirement is for "very good", so you would not expect any to be "pass"? Mr Yate: You should not. I think it is fair to say that there are probably some at the moment because of the issues that we have talked about in terms of the speed of procurement in the first round. The issues that needed to be considered have not been considered early enough in the process. There are some at the moment. I am aware of one that has gone through certification and has achieved a "pass", there is another one that has achieved a "good" and there is one that has achieved a "very good". Those are the three that have completed the process at the moment. Q512 Stephen Williams: So in the first wave there will be schools below "very good"? Mr Yate: There will be, and the important thing is to learn the lessons from that first round so that we do not find ourselves in that position in later rounds, it seems to me. Q513 Stephen Williams: At the design stage when all these measurements are being assessed, are you aware of any areas where it might have led to a school being rated at "excellent" or "very good" but, because of the expense issue, have been squeezed out of the design process which has led to the school going down to "very good", for instance? Mr Yate: I am not personally aware of that. We would not have that information because we are not involved in the detailed assessment itself, so we are not in discussion with design teams. Q514 Stephen Williams: Chairman, are any of the witnesses aware of schools at the design stage being squeezed out because of cost or budget? Mr Mayfield: Yes, all the time. I think it is also worth saying that the problem with BREEAM is that BREEAM's "very good" is not very good at all. I am not having a go at the standard, it is just that people think, "If I am doing BREEAM "excellent" then I am doing really well", when the reality is that you are doing really badly. Q515 Stephen Williams: Even if you are excellent you are doing badly? Mr Mayfield: Yes. Stephen Williams: You need to expand on that? Q516 Chairman: You are saying BREEAM is useless then. Mr Mayfield: No, I am saying that BREEAM as a process is a useful tool kit. I am just saying that the data that are set within there, compared with where we need to be sustainable, it is not even nibbling away at the edges, well, it is nibbling away at the edges. Mr Yate: It comes down to the initial point that was being discussed, which is how we define a sustainable school, does it not, and the balance between the environmental impact of that building and the impact in terms of cost, particularly because we are about cost. The parameter that was used in terms of setting the different rating thresholds did have a cost element to it, so the very good rating is set at a level. I have got a cost study in front of me carried out by Faithful and Gould on the cost of compliance with BREEAM standards. The "very good" level, the additional cost is somewhere in the region of three per cent on the capital cost of a new school; to achieve the "excellent" standard it jumps to ten per cent. So, as you get to higher levels there is a significant cost implication and, therefore, in a programme like BSF there are implications in terms of deliverables. Q517 Chairman: What is the BREEAM standard? Mr Yate: It is the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method. Q518 Chairman: You are saying, Martin, that is not good enough. We need a different kitemark, a kitemark that says: "This is sustainable." Mr Mayfield: Yes; absolutely. Q519 Chairman: Could that be devised? Mr Mayfield: Yes. There is enough consensus. There is always debate about whether it is 20 per cent of where we are today, or 15 per cent, or whatever, but there is enough consensus on where it is to be able to develop that standard, yes. Q520 Fiona Mactaggart: How big is BSF as a client in terms of construction in Britain today? How does it compare with Tesco or whoever does other buildings? How big is it? Mr Mayfield: It is in the top three. Q521 Fiona Mactaggart: It is in the top three. What I am hearing from you is that you have got stupid clients really. You are saying it nicely, but basically you are saying that the clients, "Don't know nothing." You are saying that one of the top three construction programmes in the country has not got properly trained clients. I would like to hear from Martin what the difference is between these clients and their competitors in terms of the other two in the top three. What is the difference? Mr Mayfield: These clients hold the kits that are going to have to deal with this issue in the next 30, 40 years. Q522 Fiona Mactaggart: I understand that, but I do not want the politician's answer, I want the company answer. What I want to know is how differently a property developer or someone who deals with property portfolios (Tesco or whoever) deals with this? Mr Mayfield: I would say that the major commercial clients are financially driven. What we are seeing in those markets is a shift. The bigger developers are actually seeing this as an issue because of its impact on their stock market value and are starting to move towards it. We are now seeing developers wanting to engage much more positively and wanting to understand where this is going to take them, because they see this issue as a risk to their assets and a risk to their future profitability. So, whilst they are coming from a lower datum, they are moving quicker, I would say, than the schools estate currently. Q523 Fiona Mactaggart: What kind of tools do they use? Do they use BREEAM as a tool or do they have other tools to assess what you do? Mr Mayfield: There are a variety of tools and benchmarking mechanisms. I think BREEAM is a reasonable tool. It comes back, quite simply, to setting the data at the right level. Q524 Fiona Mactaggart: Are there examples? What you are saying is that public procurement, in terms of the value that it puts on sustainability, has started at a slightly higher basis than private procurement, but private procurement is moving in that direction and probably moving faster than public procurement. Is that what you are saying? Mr Mayfield: I would say that is correct. Q525 Fiona Mactaggart: Are there other tools that these private procurers are using other than BREEAM which are cleverer, more subtle, which are part of this faster movement? Mr Mayfield: Yes, we have our own sustainability tool, so there are a number of tools out there, and they all try to address the same issues, some more broadly and some more specifically. I do not think the tools are necessarily the issue. It is the setting of the data and where we are trying to get to. Others do use BREEAM, others use other tools. I do not think the type of tool is the issue. Q526 Fiona Mactaggart: So it is not the type of tool, it is the standards inside it? Mr Mayfield: Yes. Q527 Fiona Mactaggart: In effect, what we are hearing is that, even if we set the BSF standard at "excellent", that would not be high enough? Mr Mayfield: Absolutely, yes. Mr Yate: If your aim is to achieve a rear step-change in terms of environmental performance of schools and move towards a more carbon-neutral situation in terms of new school building, then that is absolutely right, but the framework works for those sorts of standards. Q528 Fiona Mactaggart: Is BSF actually helping to change costs of things? If we are the biggest client, is it actually shifting costs? It seems to me that the biggest clients should be the market-maker, and I am not hearing that BSF is being a market-maker at the moment. Mr Mayfield: I think there is sporadic evidence. There are one or two schemes which are better and they have won because they were better solutions in sustainable design terms, but there is not an overriding shift at the moment. Q529 Fiona Mactaggart: Is that because we are not learning the lessons of the best clients within it? Mr Mayfield: Yes, I think we are not being clear on what the hierarchy of needs are within that. Q530 Fiona Mactaggart: Could you teach the clients to be better? Could you design a crash programme for head teachers, for local authorities, which could say: "We will put you through this in a day and, by the end of the day, you would be a much better client than you were at the beginning. We cannot teach you what you know about your schools, but we can teach you to be a better client"? Mr Terry: I would not think that would be impossible. That is what National College is trying to do at the present moment, although it is more than a day's process, it is an extended process. I think educating the client to ask the right kind of questions would be a crucial step up in making a change in the process. If you have got a market and you have got £45 billion, that should have a major impact on the way in which the industry works, because you should be able to demand those kinds of things, and if you have heads coming back and saying, "Actually I understand X. Why can you not deliver me X?", that might change the market place from that point of view. Certainly, when you have something like the WRAP study which says you could go for 30 per cent recycled in some respects and then PfS go at ten per cent, that seems to me a nonsense. We should be demanding: what can you achieve? How can you push the envelope to make it a more sustainable structure and utilise materials which can be recycled, create the markets. This is one of the big issues in the construction industry. The markets are not there for recycling. If we said, "You must have 30 per cent recycled", you would move the market. Fiona Mactaggart: One of the things I am struck by is the cost of all this. We are in a situation where it costs something like £14.50 per metre square to build a school building, it costs about £2,000 per metre square to build a new office, so we are doing this relatively cheaply. I can understand why schools are to some degree cheaper than offices. Nevertheless, how much more would it cost per square metre to get the kind of environmental standards that you, Stewart, for example, are arguing for? What would be the additional cost at present; and I want Martin to answer whether or not he thinks that by setting them we would actually drive down the costs and, if so, how fast? Do you see what I mean? Chairman: Do you want Steward first? Q531 Fiona Mactaggart: Yes, I wanted Stewart to say what he thought the additional costs were, because he is the person who is talking about the standards, and then I want Martin to assess whether there is a speed of reduction of costs if you actually set those standards. Dr Davies: As I have got the opportunity to speak first, let us talk about the kind of standards for, maybe, a 60 per cent reduction in the carbon footprint of a school. There is not a full line of research on this area, but we think, ballpark, somewhere in the region of 15 per cent, 20 per cent is what it would cost, but - and you talked about moving the market - if a programme as large as BSF went consistently for that style of construction and of requirement, then you have the traditional learning curve in business that reduces costs, so I think there should be a good opportunity, as the BSF programme went on, for that cost difference to come down. The second point is that, of course, you get some of that cost back in lower operating costs, and it may be that it is a ten-year payback, but in the life of the schools programme you may well get your money back as you go along. The third point I would make on cost is the opportunity for standardisation. If, instead of doing things 500 different ways in ten different colours, you can actually reduce that to 50 ways in five colours, you can get a cost reduction as well. There is an additional cost upfront at the moment that is not factored into the cost per square metre and we need to change the financial model against which schools are being procured to get fast enough progress in this area. Mr Mayfield: I agree with what Stewart has just said in terms of numbers. In terms of how to do it, we need to move the data from cost per square metre to cost per pupil to allow greater innovation around how to deliver the curriculum. The amount of money that councils get given by the Government is based upon a standard which relates to area, so if we can take that out of the picture and relate it to pupils, you can then look at the innovation, reduce the size of that school or optimise the size of that school to deliver the curriculum. I think that is one thing that needs to be done. There are also tensions between the different standards. There are the acoustic requirements that force up cost and there are other requirements that push cost up. I think if some hierarchy could be placed upon them, I am not saying throw the standards away, but relax them and say that standard is more important than that standard or another standard; so if you lifted up the agenda in that respect and changed it from cost per square metre to cost per pupil, I think you could see it happening relatively quickly. The first opportunities to do that are on the schemes that have been procured in the first wave. Where the schools are now being designed and built, that is too late, but there are relationships built up there between contractors, designers and councils that are going to move forward with their second waves and their third waves without going through the procurement loop. You could introduce it into that process quicker but more effectively. Q532 Fiona Mactaggart: What you are saying is that actually there is an opportunity to negotiate in existing relationships better solutions that might be rather clunky if they are done in a bidding-type process? Mr Mayfield: Yes, the problem with bidding is that it is very quick, the data are already set, you have to give everybody clear standards so there is a level playing field, and there is not the skill in enough of the councils to be able to differentiate between somebody who is doing it and somebody who is saying they are doing it, in black and white terms. Q533 Chairman: We have to move on, because we have another set of witnesses. I want to push you on one thing, Martin. You seemed to suggest the private sector, but who are the other two major clients? You said they are in the top three. Who are the other two in the top three then? Mr Mayfield: I think of it on a sector basis, so commercial and healthcare would be the other two major sectors. Q534 Chairman: You say commercial, in terms of sustainability, is moving faster? Mr Mayfield: I would say it was. Fiona Mactaggart: It is starting from another place. Q535 Chairman: Could you, another time, show us some of that, or tell us where to see it? Mr Mayfield: Yes. Q536 Chairman: As someone who represents a constituency near Leeds where the private sector has been allowed to build with almost no civic leadership, we have got Legoland which looks less sustainable than anything I have ever seen, whereas in Manchester we find civic leadership with the demand of the public sector, which drives high standards. You have pulled up commercial to the public sector level. I do not see the private sector leading in either design or sustainability. Mr Mayfield: Some of the designs on the table for commercial buildings in Leeds have moved on a generation. Q537 Chairman: So in Legoland there is better sustainability? Mr Mayfield: There is some commitment, and that is partly driven through local development frameworks. Leeds has a local planning framework which has demanded greater levels which the developers responded to, and they have sold well and let well and that has given developers--- Q538 Chairman: Why does Manchester not look so much better than Leeds then? Mr Mayfield: That is a completely different discussion. Q539 Chairman: Thank you very much, that has been very valuable. One last thing, to all four of you. Should we have the kitemark or should we have a champion for sustainability driving the Department, or linking the Department perhaps with the Department for the Environment? Mr Mayfield: I think just the kitemark, because there is enough capability out there to deliver it. We just need a clear standard. Q540 Chairman: You like the kitemark. Stewart? Dr Davies: If it needs a champion to get the thinking joined up very urgently, then that might be a good idea. Q541 Chairman: What about you, Stan? Mr Terry: I agree. If it is going to get the agenda moving forward quicker, we want a champion but we need a kitemark which says, "This is what is good." Q542 Chairman: Alan? Mr Yate: I think it is the champion really, because setting the kitemark is the easy bit. I think you need to sort out the priorities. Chairman: Excellent. Thank you very much. If you think of anything we should have asked you or anything you should have told us, please get in touch with us. We would like a relationship to make sure this inquiry report is good. Memorandum submitted by Caroline Morland Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Chris Archer, Services Director, Children's Services Department, Nottingham City Council, Mr Jim Burke, Principal, Academy of St Francis of Assisi, Liverpool, and Ms Caroline Morland, Edunova Ltd, gave evidence. Q543 Chairman: Could I welcome Jim Burke, Chris Archer and Caroline Morland to our deliberations. I saw Jim and Chris. Caroline, were you listening to that last session? Ms Morland: Yes. Q544 Chairman: I hope you found it interesting. We certainly found it a very good session. We are squeezed for time but we are going to get started. You listened to that. Were they talking about the world that you inhabit? Did it strike a chord with your experience? Mr Burke: Certainly. I am the principal of a new academy which was built very much with sustainable development in mind. It is a joint faith academy serving a very disadvantaged area of Liverpool. We moved into our new building in September 2005, although it was not actually completed until March 2006 so we had a phase of contractors on site. Nevertheless, our academy has many environmental features which were alluded to, so we have been re-harvesting rainwater, using solar power, we used recycled materials for part of the furniture infrastructure, concrete mass structure (which obviously has thermal mass benefits), photovoltaic cells, et cetera, so we feel very privileged that we have got a lot of these sustainable features. Where I sympathise with head teachers in the BSF process, though, is that I had 12 months of helping at the planning stage, so I was able to work with architects, understand what the building was going to be about, the features that it had. I had that opportunity also to start planning the curriculum so that sustainability could be integrated into the curriculum. My colleagues in BSF have to manage their schools on a day-to-day basis at the same time as trying to prepare for their new school, trying to take on board all the issues of sustainability and crash courses in a day. I had 12 months, effectively, and so when people ask, "Can you skill up heads very quickly?", I think that is going to be immensely difficult in terms of everything else that a head teacher is supposed to do. The other aspect is that we are very much a greenhouse in the sense we have been closely monitored, and, to be fair to the DfES, they have already produced case studies on sustainable schools, and I know that because we feature in a booklet which they recently produced. What they are starting to do is produce a body of evidence to look at what schools should have if they are to be truly sustainable. Q545 Chairman: Why are you so good on sustainability? Mr Burke: Because at the outset our school's speciality was always going to be science/sustainability, and so when the architects were engaged that was their brief: "You have got to build a sustainable school." Q546 Chairman: How did you make yourself a good client? Why are you so good? The Independent says you are Britain's greenest school. Have you been a secret environmental warrior all these years? Mr Burke: Aux contraire, I was obviously very interested in the environment and sustainability, but again I worked very closely with the architect and the builder. Just post design stage the architect was engaged because he had environmental sustainability credentials, but I was able to engage with him at a very early stage, and indeed my senior management team were able to engage with the architects at an early stage, so we were part of that process. We came in looking at what would the impacts of sustainability be on our students, on our curriculum, on engaging the community, but effectively the architects themselves were the people who were there as the experts, and really there was a steep learning curve for us which they helped us with considerably. Q547 Chairman: Chris, if you were advising, what sort of back-up would you give in Nottingham if you had got a new school, a new wave? Are you in the first wave? Mr Archer: No, we are in wave two. Q548 Chairman: You listened to the last lot of evidence and you have now listened to Jim. Where are you in all this? Mr Archer: I think the first thing to say is I learnt a great deal from the first set of evidence, so I will make that quite clear from the outset. Secondly, from the point of view of the position in which we find ourselves in wave two, our first reference scheme schools and their head teachers and management teams and their student body - we have not heard too much about the involvement of students in that whole process - are actively engaged in planning what their school will look like when construction begins, we hope, in January 2008. We are talking about a much better lead-in time than the lead-in times that you have heard about thus far. I think it is also true to say that we have put our emphasis at this stage on thinking about what will the educational experience look like, what is education looking like as we cast our eyes forward, what sort of experience do we want those young people to have and what can they tell us about the experience they are having now to help us get it better for the future? The sustainability and environmental issues are on the agenda, but they are a little bit further behind, and it seems to me, having listened, that one of the crucial things that I have heard this morning is that BREEAM, for example, is not good enough. We are in the process of thinking, providing we are heading for that BREEAM "excellent" standard, then we are going to do what is necessary. If that is not the case, we need to know quickly, because we do have a will to do that but we can only do it with the best kind of advice. Q549 Chairman: Have you gone to look at schools like Jim's to learn lessons? Mr Archer: We have not specifically looked at Jim's school and we have not sought out schools on environmental sustainability yet, although I think that we are minded to look at those issues already. We have some primary schools in Nottingham that already have some significant environmentally friendly features, so we have got that on the agenda but it has not been a primary focus as yet. Q550 Chairman: Caroline, we are looking at the sustainable school holistically and Chris has just mentioned what goes on in a school. We have been concentrating to date a lot on the building, the fabric, the sustainability, and so on, the energy, the carbon footprint. Do you know anything about schools later in the 21st century? People have been saying to this Committee, "It is not going to be 30 students in a room with a teacher with white boards or computers, it is going to be something different". Is it? Ms Morland: I think it has the potential to be something different. I think it will stay comparatively the same if we are not investing, as you say, in some of this expert dialogue about how we move from where we currently are to some of those potential features, because one of the tensions in the system is everybody has their day job, so, they are out there, they are delivering, they are working with young people, they do not have the time to go away and think about how they are going to deploy their ICT to re-engineer the process of learning, how they are going to change the group organisation, the curriculum and the timetable in advance of them locking themselves into an infrastructure. It is that process and building capacity within the system to release the debating time and the exploring time for all the practitioners and the students and, critically, the parents, stakeholders who have views and opinions about this, in a debate about how it could be different. It is interesting. Just picking up on some of the earlier evidence, it is that debate between conflicting priorities. I have spent a lot of time working with schools and stakeholders trying to develop recommendations or specifications. Their key priority is always going to be learning and outcomes, and that is what they think about, and they tend to then prioritise things like equipment, furniture, area. So the bigger the better, then we have got some flexibility to reorganise and do different things above and beyond sustainability, because that is who they are, they are practitioners - that is their deliverable, their outcome and their experience. So, unless we have got a balancing voice sitting alongside them championing sustainability in a positive and collaborative way, because I think everybody's heart is in the right place, they want a sustainable school, but if we are then throwing more money at the problem, that money will get spent on bigger schools, it will not necessarily get spent on more sustainable schools. Q551 Chairman: So you are suggesting there should be a sustainability champion locally? Ms Morland: I think so. I am a big advocate. Again, trying to solve the problem of how we find the time for this consultation and how we find the time to get expert clients is that we need a smaller team of representatives who can become the experts on behalf of a group of schools or a cluster of schools. There has got to be constant communication back down, but I think, going back to the point about is BSF the biggest programme, in one sense it is one of the biggest programmes, in another sense it is one of the most fragmented and smallest programmes because the actual individual procurement decisions are actually quite small and, therefore, are not getting the impact and the savings. Chairman: Thank you for that. Q552 Jeff Ennis: I guess most of my questions will be focused on trying to tease out from Chris a bit more information about the Nottingham model. It appears to me, Chris, you have got quite a high percentage of new academies coming on stream. I am wondering why you decided on having three academies in Nottingham, and who were the sponsors of the three academies as well? Mr Archer: The short answer is we will have four, at least that is what we aim to have, because we already had an existing academy, Djanogly City Academy. The short answer probably is that the opportunity of that much major investment into the city was seen as locally too good an opportunity for future generations to miss. I think underlying that there is a series of other issues. Clearly, we had a good relationship with Djanogly Academy and felt that it was doing a good job, and therefore the opportunity to replicate that was important to us. I think it is also true to say that we have pockets of chronic under-achievement in Nottingham and we are looking at every opportunity we can to raise that achievement and to raise the aspiration that leads to that achievement. Q553 Chairman: Graham Allen keeps telling us about that. He is trying to do something about it. Mr Archer: I am sure he does, as he tells us when he talks with us. I think that we saw it as the opportunity. The third thing is that we have embraced the notion that we have got to look at every possible opportunity in the diverse nature of secondary education possibilities that are around to us, and academies are clearly one of them. Alongside that, of course, we want to make sure that we do not leave these as free, independent organisations which do not play a part in the whole, but I am sure you are going to come to that in a moment. Q554 Jeff Ennis: I am wondering, because hopefully you are going to have a big BSF programme as well as a new academy programme, how well will these programmes mesh together? Will it be a seamless service or are there any tensions between the two? Mr Archer: It has been absolutely fundamental to us from the outset that the two are as seamless as they can possibly be. What we have tried to develop is a vision for educational provision across the city that sees those academies strategically placed. We have set out, for example, to create three clusters of secondary schools across the city, but they will now be co-operative clusters. They are already formed into education improvement partnerships. The academy will be a significant player in each of those education improvement partnerships from the outset; they will co-operate with us over things like 14-19 provision, hard to place pupils, the issues related to SEN. It is fundamental to our planning of those academies within the whole BSF programme that they are a part of the whole family of schools and not separate from it. Q555 Jeff Ennis: How do you engage the communities in such a big rationalisation process? I have been involved in that, because we have got a big BSF programme in Barnsley currently. Will the communities know the difference if they are in an academy area or in a BSF area? Mr Archer: I suppose I hope, in a way, that they do not. What they experience is excellent education in every area of the City of Nottingham, but there will be opportunities for young people who are experiencing their education in academy to go into other community schools to access part of their 14-19 offering, the vocational element of it perhaps, they might go into other schools as part of their Extended Schools offering, so gifted and talented students might pass from one school to another for different things. In a sense, I hope that what we do not see is a two or three-tier system, because we want excellence for all of our communities. So far, when we have presented to our communities that this is our vision and this is our hope for them, almost overwhelmingly we have had community support for that approach. Q556 Jeff Ennis: Do you see there being any difference in the sustainability element that is embedded in the new schools between BSF schools and the academies? Are they all going to be working to the same high standard? Mr Archer: I think the major change over the last six months, of course, has been the move to embed the procurement of the academies in the local education partnership through the BSF process as opposed to being procured separately. What that means is that as a local authority, and, therefore, into the local education partnership, we will have the opportunity to have a very significant say in the building standards and the sustainability standards that we are expecting to produce. There is still quite a bit of tension yet to work out how that whole system is going to work. Nevertheless, the trade-off will be that we ensure that consistency. Q557 Jeff Ennis: One final question, Chairman. It is not really relevant to the sustainability issue, but I notice that you have got five secondary schools and two special schools involved in the BSF programme in Nottingham, according to our brief. Did you consider the possibility of having a joint campus between a secondary school and a special school like the Darlington Education Village-type scenario? Mr Archer: We actually have and are developing one. It is not going to be quite the same mode as Darlington, but we have a campus where a brand new special school is going to be created from the closure of two highly successful special schools already, to create a centre of excellence which will sit side by side with our full service extended school, which is to be heavily refurbished, but will also sit on the site of a primary school, also sit on the same campus as the local tartan running track and the sports centre and the proposed new competition-standard swimming pool. So, what we are aiming for is a campus of some magnitude here. Q558 Helen Jones: Caroline, do you think that we are perhaps missing a major opportunity here to rethink the way that education is delivered? It was interesting, you said earlier that practitioners find it difficult to do that because of time, but, surely, if you are a major practitioner in education, that ought to be one of your major concerns? Why is that being missed, in your view, if it is, and what can we do about it? Ms Morland: I think there are a lot of debates going on in the education community about new models for learning, and so on. I think there is a challenge. I suppose my personal experience is heavily emphasised on the capital programmes, and the prioritising of spending for the capital programmes tends to be in highly deprived areas and in schools that need their attainment and achievement improved. So, you are dealing with stakeholders who are currently managing quite significant operational challenges and, therefore, they have less time. Q559 Helen Jones: Or in some cases not managing. Ms Morland: Exactly, in some cases not managing. So, we are orienting quite a lot of the BSF funding and thinking to a group of people who are dealing with behaviour, dealing with deprivation, dealing with stabilising a school community so they can start accessing the curriculum and achieving and not necessarily targeting some of the capital programmes to more of our innovative schools who are high performers who may have more space in their leadership and mental time to explore new models of learning. Q560 Helen Jones: Does the capital programme not give you a major opportunity to tackle those issues? Why are people missing out on the connection is what I am asking. Ms Morland: I think the day-to-day practicality of actually having the time to engage in thinking through the vision. Nottingham and all the BSF authorities are going through processes of pulling head teachers together, communities, stakeholder engagement and debating conversations, but actually getting those head teachers away from their day-to-day reality and having the confidence to believe that there is a new way of working that they can deliver on the ground. We can all talk theory, the Chairman mentioned it at the beginning, but it is that genuine belief that they can deliver that theory and it is not going to destabilise what is happening today. That is a lot of the tension in the system from my experience. Q561 Helen Jones: Jim, St Francis of Assisi serves a very deprived community. How much did changing the kind of education that was on offer affect your thinking and how did you link that into making the school sustainable in environmental terms? Mr Burke: The school was built on the principle of sustainability. We looked at it: how do we build sustainability into the school? Obviously there are opportunities across the curriculum, and we have engaged in major projects involving subjects like DT, geography, science, art, et cetera, which have engaged the children practically. One practical activity they have engaged in is they have designed, costed and produced garden areas around the school - these are our new academy intake - which was a fantastic learning experience and directly related to the curriculum, and so sustainability is really at the heart of everything we are trying to do. In terms of teaching and learning, clearly again I had time - we keep coming back to this - to look at what the building was about and how we could or how we should change our teaching and learning activities to ensure that we were taking terrific advantage of the building and, at the same time, raising standards. Whilst we have only been open 12 months, I think that all the effort that the staff and governors have put in has proved beneficial. Our results have improved remarkably after just 12 months, and not only have achievements improved but attendance has improved, people's attitudes have improved and exclusions have reduced, and so I feel that we have taken terrific advantage. In addition to that, we have also attracted terrific community support, because again, in terms of sustainability, our resources are there for the use of the whole community. We are open from seven in the morning, when our first pupils arrive, to ten in the evening and our communities basically use it from five o'clock onwards. All in all, I think the building of a school in that area has had enormous benefits for the whole community. Helen Jones: That leads me on to what I want to ask about the building and design of schools. The schools that we are going to build now have got to deliver, not just the kind of education we want now but they have got to be buildings capable of perhaps delivering a vastly changed education in the future. They are also expected, in many cases, to deliver things for the community around them in terms of community facilities and so on. I wonder if any of you can tell me what you know about any best practice involving the community but also what assessment is made of these buildings to see whether they will be fit for purpose, not just now when they are built but at the end of this century? Q562 Chairman: Who is going to take that? Caroline, you have looked at the private and the public sector experience, have you not? Ms Morland: Yes, we advise on both of those. Starting at the end, how we are checking that they are future-proof. Certainly on a technical level, there is quite a lot of emphasis throughout the BSF process on this and the architects are being challenged. Some of the things that schools are now asking for in their more expert role is: "Show me how that building looks when we open it in September 2009, show me what it will look like in 2013 and show me what it could look like in 2020." Q563 Helen Jones: How do you know if it will be fit for purpose if nobody has thought through the educational implications? Ms Morland: We are building in choice, so the solutions that are coming out now are more around the plural world, that the building will be fit for multiple ways of doing things with different configurations and different deployment of technology and internal structures. So, we are not backing one horse. We are not saying we can look into a crystal ball and we know what it is going to be like in 15 years' time for that school. What we are saying is it could be this, it could be that and it could be another and this building will be resilient to certain forms of adaptation to enable it to operate irrespective of which model ends up evolving and developing in that community and in that school. I suppose there is a small suite of scenarios that we are genuinely considering, some respond to the smaller schools, school within a school type concept, some respond to the more personalised, more autonomous learner that Kent and Birmingham may be pushing. There are probably four or five scenarios that we test a technical building against rather than 150, but what we are striving for is that we are not making that determination, we are not forcing a single pathway in terms of the infrastructure, and we are enabling the building to move depending on how the educational emphasis goes. Helen Jones: When St Francis's was built, as I understand it, in the original model the academy's sponsor had quite a strong role. I wonder if I could ask Jim how strong a role the sponsor had in driving the designing and whether Chris could tell us what is happening in Nottingham where the whole thing seems to be more integrated. What is the role of the sponsors in Nottingham compared with the role that they would have had in driving the design of St Francis? Q564 Chairman: Jim, you are an early academy, are you not? Mr Burke: Yes, we are one of the first 27, I think. Our sponsors had significant influence in the design of the school. As I say, our sponsors are the Catholic Church and the Church of England, and sustainability in the environment and care of the environment were key features of the building; so when they engaged the architects the brief was, "Build me a school with those principles of sustainability at the heart of any design", and that is why they engaged the firm that they did, because the team of architects employed very much met the criteria laid down by the sponsors. Q565 Chairman: Who were the architects? Mr Burke: Capita Percy Thomas. Q566 Chairman: And the builders? Mr Burke: Birse. Q567 Helen Jones: What about Nottingham? Mr Archer: I think this is an area that gives us some anxiety and it is yet really to be tested. The situation currently is that the sponsors are engaged in the visioning process, they have appointed their project management groups, they have got a project manager appointed by the DfES academies unit to develop all of that. At the same time we are working really hard to ensure that we have got the infrastructure in place to develop the outline business case for what the building will be and what it will look like. We have already got indications of what the funding envelope is, but we have obviously got to turn that into some kind of outline plan, probably up to RIBA Stage B, to hand on to the let when it is formed at the end of next year if we are going meet our target of the buildings being completed by September 2009. What gives me anxiety is ensuring that we do not have discontinuity between what the sponsor wants and believes and has an aspiration for and what we can deliver and what meets our fundamental standards and that sustainability will be part of this. Q568 Helen Jones: Who are the sponsors? Mr Archer: The sponsors who have been declared for the two academies that are in that feasibility stage, in one case it is the Edge Organisation, which is a charitable organisation, and you are familiar with them; in the other case it is a combination of a private sponsor, David Samworth, and the University of Nottingham, and they are working in concert. Q569 Helen Jones: Finally, we have talked a lot about building new schools with the BSF and a lot of schools are being refurbished as well. How do the sustainability issues feed into the refurbishment of schools - perhaps Caroline can answer this - and are people as aware of them when they do refurbishments as they should be? Ms Morland: I have sat on a couple of design teams very recently having this conversation, and I think the reality is that expectations on the client side have not understood the impacts of sustainability in terms of refurbishment. What I am hearing from the design teams (and that is obviously their competence, not mine) is that just to upgrade technically a refurbished school to some of the sustainability standards that we want to achieve will take the lion's share, if not 100 per cent, of the funding envelope and will leave almost nothing for re-equipping or re-modelling the actual areas of the school and how they would work. We have got a client out there who thinks they are going to get a refurbished school that will move them towards new ways of working, and actually what they are going to get is window replacement, structural changes, changes to their heating systems which will make the building more sustainable but, to be honest, they will not, or may not, notice in terms of its impact on the actual operation of how that school can work. Q570 Paul Holmes: The figures for the cost of building new schools, on average we are told that a BSF school is about £14.5 million and that an academy is about £25 million. The Government quibble about this. In Nottingham's experience what is the cost of the two areas of schools that you have either built or are about to, and what was Jim's cost? Mr Archer: Obviously, I do not know about Jim's cost. The figures that we are looking at obviously vary according to the size of the school, but I would have said slightly more than the £14 million, nearer towards the high teens of millions for the average type of comprehensive school that we are going to build. Q571 Paul Holmes: What about the three academies? Mr Archer: The academies are going to be built to the same funding formula. Back to the previous question, managing that tension between expectation and reality, I think, could be quite difficult. Q572 Paul Holmes: What was the cost of your academy? Mr Burke: Capital cost was just over £16 million, £16.5 million. That is for 7,800 square metres. Q573 Paul Holmes: Does that include all the design costs? Mr Burke: There are the fees on top of that. In total I think everything came to around £20 million with the fees. Q574 Mr Marsden: What proportion of your students at the academy are special needs or children with disabilities, would you say? What sort of numbers? Mr Burke: On the special needs register we have approximately one-third of the school. Statementing is quite low, about two per cent, which is fairly average. Q575 Mr Marsden: The reason I ask the question is we are talking about sustainability, and access is part of that as well. I just wondered, accepting they are not all going to be in a wheelchair or have that sort of physical disability, to what extent access was built into the design process and to what extent you are finding fewer difficulties in accommodating them compared with your experiences in traditional schools previously? Mr Burke: Of course the building has to comply with DDA regulations, which it does, so there is no problem in terms of physical access. I think the issue is curricular access given the large number of youngsters with special needs that we have. That is where most of our energies are aimed. In terms of the predecessor school, it is very similar, because the predecessor school was similarly in a disadvantaged area with similar numbers of youngsters with special needs. What we are finding though is that we can far greater meet the needs of our youngsters with special needs in a learning environment such as we have with the emphasis on technology, just with the whole building. It is a lighter, airier building and it is more conducive to learning. There is no doubt that a building can have a direct impact on youngsters learning, particularly youngsters with special needs whose needs generally, certainly in the predecessor school, were not well served. Q576 Chairman: Do the students love the school? Mr Burke: Absolutely, they are very proud of the school. When we have visitors, which we do regularly, the youngsters take the visitors round and, without exception, we have had terrific feedback about how knowledgeable, how keen, how proud they are of the school, so it has made a fantastic difference in terms of self-esteem. Q577 Chairman: In your part of Liverpool, was there ever any thought of making a multi-faith academy embracing other faiths. Mr Burke: Well, I would argue that ours is. Q578 Chairman: It is dual. Mr Burke: It is dual, it is Catholic/Church of England, but really it is Church of England/community. So, in fact, if you look at percentages, it is somewhere in the region of 50 per cent Catholic youngsters, probably 15 per cent Church of England and the rest are youngsters of no faith and other faiths. Q579 Chairman: Do you have a substantial number of Muslim children? Mr Burke: We are increasingly attracting some, because the predecessor school was a Catholic school. We are now joint-faith but our admissions area is the immediate area of Kensington and Fairfield where there are a significant number of youngsters with English as an additional language, so our numbers will increase as the academy grows. Q580 Chairman: Are you totally happy with your architect and your builder? Mr Burke: Yes, without a doubt. Chairman: That is a good recommendation. Q581 Stephen Williams: A quick question to Mr Burke first and maybe the other witnesses as well. In these sessions when we talk about sustainability we tend to look at the carbon footprint, how the school contributes to current learning patterns or the wow factor for the children, that you have essentially just mentioned, but "built to last" ought to be part of sustainability as well. How confident are you that the children of Fairfield and Kensington, I think you said, in Liverpool will still be going through the gates of this school in 2106? Mr Burke: Do you mean will it be attractive to them? Q582 Stephen Williams: Will the building still be there? Mr Burke: The concrete structure has a 200-year lifespan, we know the wood has a 70-year lifespan, and so in terms of sustainability I think we have got reasonable value for money. Q583 Stephen Williams: So the wood is there for the next 70 years? Mr Burke: Yes. Q584 Chairman: What do you make of the suggestion that all schools should have sprinkler systems put in when they build them? Is that part of sustainability? Do you have them in your school? Mr Burke: No, we do not. Q585 Chairman: Is that not an horrendous cost for insurance if you do not have a sprinkler system? Mr Burke: You mean because we do not have a sprinkler system, did the costs go up? Not at all. We are a concrete mass school. Q586 Chairman: It is just that we were told that many schools are not having sprinkler systems, and this Committee has been told that every school really should have them, and that in fact the payback, in terms of reduced insurance premiums, is that you will have paid for it in six years. Chris, what is your philosophy on this? Is it part of sustainability to have sprinkler systems built into a modern school? Mr Archer: Our thinking at the moment is that we probably will, driven by our insurers to make that a likely necessity, yes. Q587 Chairman: We visit schools in terms of all sorts of inquiries and we go to some newly built where they say, not just sprinkler systems, "We have cut this out, we have cut that out", and they seem to be concentrating on the upfront capital costs, whereas they are not looking at what the payback would be in terms of reduced energy bills and insurance premiums over a ten, 20-year lifetime. Is that something that you recognise, Chris? Mr Archer: I think there is a definite danger that the long-term is going to be sacrificed for the short-term. Obviously, PFI contracts lead you towards certainly a 25-year period and considering sustainability over that period of time, but there is not any doubt, the talk that we have had of a once in a generation opportunity to renew, and so on, means that we have to get this right for a sustained period of time. We have got to imagine that these buildings are still going to be occupied in 100 years' time, like some of the Victorian ones we have talked about, and therefore we have got to do our best to ensure that they are within the value for money and the timeframe that we have got. Q588 Chairman: Have you got a sustainability champion in Nottingham? Mr Archer: We have got a member who is a sustainability champion who, I have to say, makes demands on the BSF team on a constant and regular basis, yes. Q589 Chairman: He sounds like a good lad to me. It is probably a woman actually. Mr Archer: It is not in fact, it is our Deputy Leader. Q590 Chairman: Oh, is it? Caroline, what is your view on this? Ms Morland: Just a couple of points. I think there are some practical budget issues, particularly around life cycle costing. When the capital budget is controlled by one group and some of the operating costs over the next 25 years are controlled by another group on design and build, the school will pay the insurance premium or the local authority will, and it will come out of a different pot. There are some logistical, financial and practical problems and if you do not make the same people responsible it is quite difficult to make good decision-making around whole life costs. Q591 Chairman: Is it not Chris's team's job in any area where there is a Building Schools for the Future project to balance the current capital costs with the long term? Ms Morland: Yes, but he will also be constrained by where he gets the money given to him and his capacity to borrow against future savings in order to top up the capital fund even if he knows on paper that it is that. Q592 Chairman: If you had had the local authority behind you, Jim, would you have gone for a sprinkler system? Mr Burke: We were advised at the time that it was not a requirement and, to be honest, when our school was being costed it was at a time when it looked as though the academies' budget was getting out of control. I think the advice was that it would have cost an extra five per cent on capital cost, or something like that, for a sprinkler system, so it was deemed that we would not have one. Ms Morland: To be honest, there is conflicting information coming out from the insurance sector as well about how much they value it and do not value it. It does depend on the overall fire engineering of the building how much difference a sprinkler system makes. Chairman: Perhaps we should get an insurance guru to tell us about that. Fiona? Q593 Fiona Mactaggart: I was going to ask you, Jim, a question which connects to this, which is you used to run schools, and Cardinal Heenan was the one before the present one; what is the difference in cost of running the building at your present school and the previous schools that you have run? Mr Burke: The modelling that was carried out prior to construction indicated that energy costs would make us one of the most efficient secondary schools in the country. We are monitoring that very closely. In fact, Reading University are monitoring energy use costs. The first year of energy use has not been as efficient as the modelling would have indicated, but people tell me that that is normal. The architects reckon that it will take three years before the building settles down so that we can really see excellent energy savings, but certainly the detailed modelling which was carried out would indicate that within two years from now we will be extremely energy efficient. Q594 Fiona Mactaggart: But you have not seen it in lower checks yet? Mr Burke: Interestingly, the local authority came round two weeks ago and they are comparing us with PFI schools. Our square metreage is 7,800 square metres and we were being compared with schools with 3,000 square metreage and we were using less gas, for example, than they were, so already we have seen some benefits. Q595 Chairman: We saw a school down in the West Country that really is energising its students to be involved in the sustainability agenda. They have got an energy group and the head there said once this independent group of students got together - and they have 22 different groups ranging from recycling, a link partnership with an African school in a village in The Congo and so on - all these groups did not really cost anything because, by and large, the energy group itself by turning off lights and being energy conscious saves an enormous amount of money. Do you energise your students? Mr Burke: Absolutely. We have eco councils in each year group and we have a school eco council and they are the driving force behind a lot of the energy savings and the waste management. They are involved in a lot of the decision-making and that is how students, as you say, we are trying to prepare consumers of the future, and this has been one mechanism which we have already found to be very beneficial. Q596 Chairman: Has anybody from Knowsley been talking to you about their very ambitious programme? Mr Burke: Yes, the BSF team from Knowsley have visited us. We have had a few BSF teams. Q597 Chairman: They seem to be doing a standard model, are they not, a one-size-fits-all model. Is that right? Mr Burke: I am not sure, I could not say. Q598 Chairman: We are intending visiting Knowsley. Ms Morland: I think they are but, to be honest, Knowsley have got a track record over the last ten years of consulting heavily at a collective level with all their schools so their standardisation is part of an overall harmonious and collaborative strategy and they are building on that, they have not kept on that for BSF. Q599 Chairman: Is there a Lego kind of approach to it? Ms Morland: I think there is a lot further we can go in terms of commonalty. As you say, should a school in inner city Liverpool generically be any different from a school in inner city Manchester? I think we do have to recognise that there are different curriculum models and pedagogic styles and there is a policy around diversity and choice, so I think that will drive differences in architecture, but I think it will be around four, five, maybe half a dozen models and you can standardise around that sort of suite. It is never going to be identical but I think we can go a lot further in that direction. Q600 Chairman: We are coming to the end of this session and I have one last question, and that is even if you get the BSF, you are all experienced professionals in the sector, outside of Building Schools for the Future or the academies, is the Government doing enough to raise in school and in local education authorities the question of environmental sustainability? Mr Archer: I think that it could figure more largely on the agenda being put forward through Building Schools for the Future and through Partnerships for Schools. I do not think it has figured as strongly in the guidance and the national conferences and so on which you might have expected. Mr Burke: It could do more, there is no doubt about it, but it has started. Sustainable Schools is now a major initiative. There is a longitudinal study on sustainability in schools. Ms Morland: One thing that I would say that I would view as very positive is almost all the local authorities that we are coming across are very big on economic sustainability for their towns and regions. They are really leading and pushing that agenda and it is coming back through into the supply chain that they are looking for local employment, local sourcing. They want the retention of the BSF funding in their cities and regions and they want that to be a multiplier effect, so they are very much looking at the learning agenda and the employment agenda and BSF is a big pump prime for that, and I would sponsor that and advocate that as a good idea. Q601 Chairman: It is linked to their regeneration agenda. Ms Morland: Big time. Q602 Chairman: If you were going to give this Committee something that you wanted to be in our report, and if we missed it out it would be not such a good report, what should we have in that is close to your heart? Mr Burke: Having been through the process where I have had time to work with the architects to understand the whole issue of sustainability, I would have said time for heads and colleagues who are involved in the BSF project to really get their heads around sustainability and the implications of it. Mr Archer: I would build on that and say can you also reflect the tension between the expectation and the excitement generated in communities for BSF with the need for that planning cycle. You heard earlier on that these things are having to happen very quickly, therefore there is not time and I do recognise that that is a problem for us. Equally, if the whole timeframe for BSF is so protracted, that excitement and that community engagement withers because they do not believe it is ever going to happen, so we have got to balance speed with that sort of planning. Ms Morland: I think it is echoing my last point, it is putting the context of Sustainable Communities into this, that schools are engines for skills and cultural and economic growth for communities. It is not all about energy, it is not all about resources; it is about people as well and it has got to have that balance. Chairman: That is a very good note on which to end. Caroline, Chris, Jim, thank you very much for your attendance, it has been most useful. We will swing by your school if you are not careful! |