Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)

MR MICHAEL BUCHANAN, MR DAVID LLOYD JONES, MS ANGELA RAWSON, MS JANET NEWTON AND MR ALLAN JARVIS

24 MAY 2006

  Q20  Jeff Ennis: That is a very good answer, but I am wondering if any of the other witnesses have got any other common elements that a new school build should have other than those already mentioned.

  Mr Buchanan: Perhaps I could offer four simple suggestions. One is that we are committed not just in education, but more broadly, to an issue of personalisation and this suggests that individual learners will have particular needs and plans associated with them and different kinds of spaces, often smaller spaces, where groups can work in quiet environments, either gifted and talented children or perhaps children with special educational needs requiring particular support. The second area, I think, which is common to all is that we need to make a very serious response to the 14-19 agenda and the breadth of the curriculum in order to give many more opportunities to youngsters of that age to progress and succeed, and the kinds of courses associated with the new vocational diplomas again require different kinds of spaces, although I do recognise that each individual school will not be able to offer them all. Thirdly, in terms of inclusion, special educational needs, social inclusion, the whole breadth of inclusion, we need to get used to the concept that, within schools, a range of adults drawn from a number of different agencies will be working with young children and families and will require different, again semi-confidential spaces for those targeted interventions to take place. The fourth area, which is something that is very significant, is that we need to up our game in relation to ICT and the use of new technologies which clearly offer a significant future for youngsters to be able to operate in a global society in the 21st century and, if we get it wrong, we will definitely fall behind other areas of the world.

  Q21  Jeff Ennis: That was a very good answer. Is the guidance from the DfES on the sorts of schools expected from Building Schools for the Future clear enough or should the guidance be more specific?

  Ms Rawson: I think we have enough guidance. I think the joining up of guidance with different policy strands and with local needs is actually the trick. We can actually drown in guidance and we have had enough guidance, I think, from the various agencies. The key challenge, as I say, is how you match that with policy strands around extended schools, inclusion, looking at health and safety, travel to schools, green issues, how you also match the particular curriculum and learning needs of youngsters on an individual personalised basis, and I think that is where the ongoing discussion and the work that we have been doing with teachers and with communities is crucial because we have to find a way through that because the only sustainable solution is one where you get local buy-in.

  Mr Lloyd Jones: Just following up the question about guidance, particularly on the design side, there is an enormous amount of guidance in educational design now which actually we welcome very much because clearly a lot of work has been put into it, but it is purely guidance. Actually it is a very good way of testing one's own approach and testing the group approach to a design of a school and that is how we use it and we use it very productively in that way.

  Q22  Chairman: But you said just a moment ago that architects get on the site too late to make any difference.

  Mr Lloyd Jones: Often they do, but sometimes they get on earlier. Once we do get on site, we make our presence felt. We get teams together and we revisit some of the decisions which have already been made.

  Q23  Dr Blackman-Woods: I am a governor at a school which is starting the process of rebuilding, so I am very much at the receiving end of a lot of these policies and guidance, but my question is really about the lead-in time for a design and what ideally you think that should be?

  Ms Newton: I think certainly in terms of a brand-new build, if it is a brand-new build you are indeed having, scoping the project if it is going to be involved in a reorganisation can take 12 months, so it is identifying the funding because clearly you need to know the funding envelope that you have. If it is a Building Schools for the Future project, the lead-in time is quite significant. We actually found that we were a short-listed authority, a reserve authority in February 2004. We started the design process with our schools in March 2005 in terms of developing the brief, a very detailed brief, and the vision that the schools wanted to deliver. We had significant meetings with the architects throughout the spring and summer and those meetings are still going on in terms of finalising the detailed design, so from start to finish it will have been over 12 months and there is a significant commitment on the part of the head teachers, the senior staff and the governors because, the more you put into the process, the more you will get out of the process. I think it is a case of making the time at the beginning, recognising the commitment and making sure that you get it right, and I would say up to 12 months as a minimum before you even get on site.

  Q24  Dr Blackman-Woods: I have to say, what we are struggling with a bit is the "visioning" as a governing body, not that we do not have ideas about what we would like to see in the future, but I think all governing bodies need assistance with how that then translates into buildings and indeed what the design solutions are, so my question is really what needs to happen to ensure that the key stakeholders, in terms of putting a new building together, know what is possible in design terms?

  Mr Lloyd Jones: I think the key to this is developing a brief and this can come about in a number of ways. It can be generated by the governing body or it can be generated by the school itself, by the local authority and so on, but it needs to be a document or a file that gradually builds up and takes on board all the sorts of ideas and concepts that different people have which is then honed and developed to a point where it becomes something that a designer can work to and pin down the actual aspirations of the school, the achievements and the goals.

  Q25  Dr Blackman-Woods: But with the process which exists at the moment, if you get one architect coming in to a governing body, you are not necessarily, as the governing body, going to know the whole range of solutions that are available or the possible designs, so what needs to happen so that the governing bodies and other people involved in the decision are aware of a wider range of possibilities? How do we share good practice and indeed how do we avoid the pitfalls?

  Ms Rawson: One of the things that we established early on, and this again was in 2004, was a visioning group across the whole of the BSF Wave 1 schools and we got governors, pupils, teaching and non-teaching staff and put them on a coach and we took them round recent new builds. The way we organised it was that we did a visit in the morning and then I followed it up with a workshop for them to talk about their experience of being in that different place, the things they liked and the things that they felt would be barriers either for the community, because you want the community to come into the school, or for young people, about the sorts of spaces that were available for them, the sizes of the classrooms, the light, the environment, all of those things. It was a very practical exercise, but at least people started to build up, if you like, their own internal criteria for what they felt their school of the future should have.

  Q26  Chairman: What did your people think of the new builds? Was it similar to Allan's?

  Ms Rawson: Well, we did not sort of dismiss anything outright because, in each of the schools that we went to visit, people saw some of the features where they thought, "Yes, that would work for us".

  Q27  Chairman: So different from Allan's scoring.

  Mr Jarvis: I support Angela's remarks. I think you need quite consciously to create a research phase in procuring your new schools in which, not acting school by school, but acting collaboratively because in that way you capture a lot of good thinking that would otherwise escape you, so working collaboratively between schools and with architects and advisers and, with the benefit of support from CABE, for example, or from Toby over there in the corner and his team at the Design Council, you drill down into some of the possibilities, see some examples and yes, you do exactly what Angela has said. You go to school after school after school, you see a feature in one school which delivers one outcome that you like, but you see other things that do not deliver all the range of outcomes that you require, so you go to another school and see one of the other outcomes delivered and then you can have an iterative process with architects in which you discuss how you can capture both those outcomes rather than having to surrender one in order to achieve the other. That can only be done if you have quite a detailed and quite a consciously designed research phase which brings together the full range of stakeholders rather than simply, for example, to quote one example I know which I shall leave nameless, where it is all being done by a local authority asset manager and the schools are not involved in the process at all.

  Q28  Dr Blackman-Woods: Could the Building Schools for the Future team at the DfES do more, do you think, to inform governing bodies and others about what is available and what seems to have worked, get some evaluation, some feedback? Would that be an important thing to do?

  Ms Newton: I think there is certainly a role for the DfES to share and disseminate good practice because there is very much a mixed bag of provision in terms of the good design and I think, where design has worked well, there is an opportunity to share that with the school community, so I think, yes, the DfES could effectively signpost good design. I think in terms of local authority, there is a strong role in having a client team and that client team does effectively liaise through groups, such as the Education Building and Development Officers' Group, which the DfES attend, so there are networks in place where good design could be signposted, promoted and shared.

  Dr Blackman-Woods: We have been talking about the difficulties that people in education might have in getting to grips with design solutions. Is there an issue the other way round about architects not sufficiently understanding education and can you tell us what is happening and what should happen to ensure that architects do keep up to date with what is happening in education and indeed so that they are able to vision it for the future?

  Q29  Chairman: I hope you watch Teachers' TV every night!

  Mr Lloyd Jones: We keep up to date as far as we can with developments of educational research. We are particularly interested in any feedback which comes out of the DfES on sustainable issues in particular because this is an area that is relatively new in schools. I am particularly thinking of environmental sustainability and just how buildings perform because one has to determine how the value and the cost of the building, which we have not touched on before, is distributed through the building and to get feedback on how the building performs in relation to the money spent in particular areas is absolutely vital to us as architects. Education is our field and we are absolutely enthusiastic about it, so we absorb what is going on and take on board as much as we can and try to present these issues to our clients.

  Ms Rawson: The other aspect is how you prepare the companies, including architects, who are proposing to be your private sector partner and, again, investing time to ensure that they understand the education vision that you want to achieve as they are putting in their bids. One of the things we did was to have a bidder's day. We spent time explaining the vision, but also we had the feedback from the pupils from the design festival displayed, and what was very interesting when we came to evaluate bids was to what extent the proposals for designs had actually picked up on what the youngsters were saying and what had come out as part of the vision. I think, again, it is that early preparation, investing time in making sure that, whoever you choose (and the architects are part of that package), they are very clear about what it is that you are seeking to achieve.

  Q30  Chairman: Is anyone brave enough, the students, the architects or anyone ever to the say, and my team are going to groan at this, that small is beautiful—the Schumacher doctrine—that some of these schools are too darn big for human scale? Does anyone ever say that? The stock answer we get is, "Well, if it is well designed and big, it is all right", but there is a bit of me still when I go to primary schools that thinks this is the right size. Children understand this size of a building and environment, and then they go to the big school and they get lost. Is there no word out there that schools can be too big?

  Mr Jarvis: When we engaged the pupils in the design process in Bradford that is precisely one of the points they brought out. So, when we wrote our output specs in the schools, we wrote them with a view to getting the architects to find methods of capturing the feeling of a small school in what is actually quite a big school, and that is the one of the reasons why we have gone for a series of teaching blocks with break-out spaces in the centre of them with a sense of space, we have gone for a school within a school for Key Stage 3, in two other schools in Phase 1 in Bradford, so that the youngest children will spend most of their time in their own block, in their own accommodation, learning the skills of being in a mainstream secondary school of a very large size rather than being tossed in at the deep end, as tends to happen in many schools at the moment. That is part of feedback, again, from the children, and this is something I care very much about. I have been terrifically impressed with the knowlegeability of the architects, although, to be fair, the architects in Bradford engaged with the processes all have a specialism in architecture for educational purposes, but we have also been terrifically impressed with the wisdom and the understanding of the children, and what we have neglected in the past in providing schools is the children's perspective—we have looked at it purely from the teacher's perspective—and when you listen to the children, they will tell you how to design a school that delivers on those outcomes and addresses those concerns you have raised.

  Mr Lloyd Jones: I would say almost word for word what Allan has just said. I think the engagement of children, pupils, is vital in the process, and, again, if you can get in early that helps. If you can develop a school where the pupils understand what is going on, can do programmes that relate to the construction process, to engaging with different areas of design, particularly sustainability, of course, by the time they move into it they feel it is their building, they gain ownership of it, and the same is true, of course, with the staff. If you can get that feeling and also are able to break down the schools in the way that Angela was talking about so it is not this great big megalith, that helps as well.

  Q31  Mr Chaytor: Chairman, can I pursue the question of sustainability and ask Janet and David specifically what it means. As the representatives of the surveyors and the architects, what is your definition of a sustainable building, specifically a sustainable school?

  Mr Lloyd Jones: Sustainability has developed into a very all-embracing category, but, from my point of view, it arises from three areas to do with social benefit, social engagement, it is to do with local economy and how the economy develops in relation to an intervention and it is to do with the environment and ensuring that climate change is halted. There are these three spans that interconnect, and it is very difficult to deal with one to the exclusion of the other. As architects we tend to get more involved with the environmental side. There is an enormous amount of work that has been done in developing environmental measures in order to reduce the impact that buildings have on the environment. The buildings in developed countries are responsible for 50%, as you probably know, of carbon-dioxide pollution in the world, and that is why it is so important to design sustainability in terms of using materials that are sympathetic with environmental issues and minimising energy.

  Q32  Chairman: Michael, you have been quiet for a while. Do you want to give us your definition of sustainability?

  Mr Buchanan: Yes. I would describe it in a slightly different way. There are issues which David has spoken about which are absolutely right about sustainable buildings—the materials that they use and environmental factors, energy conservation and generation, waste water, lifecycle costs, all the kinds of things associated with buildings—but I think within the education sector there is a broader understanding of sustainability in relation to schools which are sustainable as organisations, where the leadership is sustainable. There is a great book recently written on that subject by Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink, for example, talking about endurance and succession and distributed leadership, and so on.

  Q33  Mr Chaytor: How can the design of a building influence the permanence of the leadership?

  Mr Buchanan: This goes back very much to the first question that Mr Sheerman asked. Does it matter? My view is possibly slightly different from my colleagues in that I think that buildings are not the answer to transformation in education. They can assist and they can assist particularly in removing obstacles to a more flexible curriculum and so on, but they form part of an education vision which is also very much to do with leadership and curriculum and working practices, and so on, so the building can support a lot of changes within education other than physical changes, cultural and working changes, and I think they are very significant in terms of schools as organisations. Because schools, of course, are not factories, they are not conveyor belts, they are places where human interactions take place, and therefore all the factors which affect the quality of human interactions are important. Some of those can be influenced very heavily by buildings, others much more likely so, but, nonetheless, they are all important.

  Q34  Mr Chaytor: Janet, from your perspective, what is sustainability and how can those concepts be implemented in the design of the buildings in Lancashire, for example?

  Ms Newton: Certainly sustainability is one of the key priorities for the county council and obviously is a central plank to the education vision that we have developed. I would pick up the issues around the community, the economy and the environment. These are in perspective. We have been very keen to follow the BREEAM ratings to try to secure a very good rating through BREEAM, we have tried to maximise the opportunities for curriculum learning; so we are putting small wind turbines on each of the schools, we are introducing photovoltaic cells, we are having biomass boilers, we are actually looking to achieve very sustainable schools from an environmental perspective. In terms of contributing to the local economy, Burnley and Pendle are very deprived poor areas, there is a skills shortage, many of the jobs are low-paid, low-skilled, and we are very keen to use the Building Schools for the Future programme to contribute to a long-term regeneration of that area.

  Q35  Mr Chaytor: For example, does that include using local labour or local companies as part of the contracts? How do you deal with the issue of preference for local firms?

  Ms Newton: In a way I am just coming to that. There is a housing market renewal strategy running through the ODPM at the same time, so there is a significant programme of building. Certainly within Building Schools for the Future it is PFI. It is looking to establish a long-term strategic partnership. The exclusivity will turn on performance. We have key performance indicators and, within our key performance indicators, we have agreed targets with our preferred bidder about the percentage of local labour that would be used in construction, the local labour that would be used through facilities management. We have negotiated 24 craft apprenticeships year on year for local students. We have negotiated mentoring opportunities. As part of our package in terms of the community, we are looking at having the facilities open from 6.30 in the morning until 6.30 at night exclusively for the schools. That is 600 hours of additional community use. We are embracing the Extended Schools Agenda, but we are actually looking at the full service Extended Schools so that the schools become a focal point for the community. We are actually encouraging the schools to feel as if they are owned by the community. We are co-locating public libraries, hydrotherapy facilities; we are putting in additional big lottery funds in terms of the sports provision, so we are looking to create as sustainable schools as we possibly can within the community.

  Q36  Mr Chaytor: Given that PFI is involved here, how sustainable are the economics of this and what are the taxpayers of Burnley and Pendle going to be paying in 20 or 30 years' time? What is your judgment about the economic sustainability of PFI verses other schemes or the impact on individual school budgets as time goes by?

  Ms Newton: We have had to go through a very robust financial assessment at each stage of the project; so we had an outlined business case that was assessed by the Treasury, by the Project Review Group, by Partnership UK, which actually secured the funding envelope for the projects in Burnley and Pendle. We are now preparing a final business case, which will go before the Treasury hopefully in June, July. Within that we have to have guaranteed the sustainability in terms of future pupil numbers, that the county council and the schools can meet the funding gap, the affordability gap, that we have got the legal agreements from the governing bodies over a 25-year period they will contribute part of their school budget towards the on-going unitary charge. I would say, from a financial perspective we have gone through a very rigorous process and are comfortable that we have been scrutinised at a national level and also locally that these schools and the PFI process will represent value for money.

  Q37  Mr Chaytor: Would it have been economically more sustainable not to have gone down the PFI route?

  Ms Newton: I think the attractions for the PFI route are in terms of the contributions to the lifecycle cost. Having built these brand new state-of-the-art schools, there will be a commitment on the part of the county council and the school community and working with the contractor that the school buildings will be maintained throughout that 25-year period, and so PFI does represent value for money for us and we will get an asset at the end of 25 years that is still in exceedingly good condition.

  Q38  Paul Holmes: You said you have got the agreement of governors for 25 years ahead to contribute in, but what happens if in five years' time under the Education Bill that is just going through they become a trust or they become an Academy; they are independent outside the system, the governors have completely changed, they are appointed by the new trust or the Academy owner. Are they still bound by this agreement?

  Ms Newton: Yes, because the governors' agreement actually reflects change of law, and so it will be a 25-year agreement and the money that the governors are contributing is the money that the governors receive through the formula allocations, delegations to schools, that specifically covers the premises aspects of their schools. They already get that funding within their budget, but, yes, it is a 25-year agreement, and we have been at pains to make sure that governors are fully aware of the implications of what they are signing.

  Q39  Paul Holmes: What happens if over the next 10, 15 years with falling rolls and with competition between schools and popular schools being allowed to expand as they like, and so on, one of these brand new schools has to close? What happens then?

  Ms Newton: Clearly, in terms of satisfying the local authority that it is value for money and satisfying the Treasury that it is value for money, we have had to look at the pupil numbers. It does tend to get into crystal ball gazing; I will be perfectly honest with you. We can look at children who have already been born and we can project forward the number of students over the life of their school. What we cannot do is anticipate the children who have not been born, but we also take into account inward and outward migration. We have a lot of years' experience in terms of predicting future student numbers and we are satisfied in the authority that the schools are sustainable over the next 25 years. In the programme in Burnley and Pendle we are taking out several thousand surplus places to ensure that the schools will be sustainable.


 
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