Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MR MICHAEL
BUCHANAN, MR
DAVID LLOYD
JONES, MS
ANGELA RAWSON,
MS JANET
NEWTON AND
MR ALLAN
JARVIS
24 MAY 2006
Q80 Chairman: Your dream-team, the
rest of you?
Ms Newton: From a personal perspective,
I think having a very strong, experienced local authority team
that is there to guide, support the head teachers, the school
governors, is important. Ultimately, the local authority team
will supply the cheques and balances, it is their guiding role.
Ultimately, finance is always important and the dream-team has
to have the appropriate skills to make sure that value for money
is achieved and that the budget is achieved: because it is very
easy to run off with your dream-team and do wonderful, creative
designs but somebody has to have an eye on the balance sheet because
somebody has to pay for this. So the dream-team needs a range
of different skills that make sure, yes, we get the inspirational
building—
Chairman: We take it for granted, but
the dream-team without some financial expertise would be heading
for disaster.
Q81 Stephen Williams: I am turning
to Mr Lloyd Jones and some questions about design. I understand
your practice is involved in Classrooms for the Future, and the
example we have been given is of your snail-shaped observatory
in North Kensington. From this or any other projects, what sort
of feedback does your practice and profession get from the teaching
profession about your design influence on a classroom?
Mr Lloyd Jones: We get some very
wide-ranging feedback from the teaching profession, from visitors
and from the pupils themselves. The particular project that you
identified, obviously, clearly is to some extent an experimental
project and has been extremely helpful in providing information
on how young children respond to an innovative environment with
a whole lot of technology that they may not be used to. It is
based on the idea of an integrated observatory into a building,
and that observatory is linked throughout the world to other observatories,
and so it opens up a whole range of things. We are continuing
talking to the school, despite the fact that we completed the
project two years ago now, and it looks as though there might
be a follow-on project. So, we try to keep in touch with the schools,
we try to raise funds to help analyse how schools are performing,
and we have been successful in raising funds from the DTI, for
example, to do specific exercises to see how specific aspects
of our buildings perform and getting the data and making it available.
I think another outlet and a way of disseminating information
is the website. All schools have a website. They can use that
to record and deliver the outcome of how the school is performing,
what is working, what is not, and I think this should be open
to everybody. We as a practice obviously try and keep in as close
touch to the schools that we are involved in as possible.
Q82 Stephen Williams: You as an architect
would stay in touch with your client and get feedback which would
go quickly back to Ms Newton as a procurer. Is that something
you would expect each school to do, to give feedback to the designer
and, if necessary, to have some remedies to any problems?
Mr Lloyd Jones: Yes, very much.
Reflecting on how the project has gone, the lessons to be learnt
is very important and we will continue, and we do analyse the
results of our designs. One of our PFI projects was actually recognised
as being a model of good practice in terms of procurement, design
and on-going maintenance, and we do collect evidence which we
use locally to benchmark against and also contribute to national
benchmarking.
Q83 Stephen Williams: Back to the
architecture, Chairman. How innovative does the Government or
DfES encourage your profession to be? I have seen several new
schools in Bristol as well as the Select Committee visit the Chairman
alluded to earlier. There is a huge variation in design. Are you
encouraged to go for cutting-edge design? Is there a budgetary
constraint on that necessarily?
Mr Lloyd Jones: I think there
are particular programmes where part of their brief is to look
at the innovative aspects that the DfES likes, the Classroom Future
Programme, for example, where it is very clearly stated that there
is an innovatory aspect to it. In terms of Building Schools for
the Future, for every bid that we complete there is always a section
on innovation and how far your practice has been innovatory. When
it comes down to the actual project, and we are looking at how
far it should be innovatory, then that is another question and
that is to do with identifying the sorts of risks that the school
is prepared to take because obviously every innovation involves
brings some degree of risk, and we can help analyse that and advise
on that and the financial advisers can do so as well. At the end
of the day, as I said earlier, it is a question of deciding where
you are going to go, what sort of risk you are prepared to take
on board, if you are prepared to take any risks or any substantial
risks on, and setting out your school accordingly and going for
it, and then hopefully get the feedback.
Q84 Stephen Williams: Is it your
experience that each school at the end of the day is a unique
project and has a design to fit the needs of the client?
Mr Lloyd Jones: Every school is
a unique product, but the ingredients that go into it do not necessarily
have to be unique. As a case in point, in Sustainable School Buildings
the facade becomes very important because there is so much going
on there, you want to get air in, you want to get light in, you
want the views out, you are wanting to do it at different times,
you want to keep the sun out at times, and so on and so forth,
and so it is quite a sophisticated package, and to do that from
scratch for each new school is counter-productive. If we can develop
something that works under most conditions and we can apply it
to a variety of schools, then obviously there is mileage to be
made out of that.
Q85 Stephen Williams: So there are
some templates that will apply everywhere, but not an overall
building template like a traditional Victorian school?
Mr Lloyd Jones: I would think
so.
Q86 Stephen Williams: A general question
maybe for Ms Rawson and Mr Jarvis. What sort of difference is
BSF going to make to the lives of pupils and teachers?
Ms Rawson: I think one of the
key aspects, and I mentioned it earlier, is actually about the
aspirations of the young people who will be using the schools
and their families. We recently had a launch event soon after
approaching and appointing our preferred bidder, and we invited
back some of the youngsters who had been involved in visits in
the design festival, and they were stunned, saying things like,
"Are you really going to build these things for us?",
and, "You did listen to us because I said it would be really
good if we could have it", and they could see it coming out
through the designs, and I think that is a key aspect for many
of the communities that we are working with at the minute. The
fact that you are actually investing in them and in their families
is going to be a key driver. The other things are around what
we hope to get out of the BSF programme that Janet alluded to
around skills legacy, around opportunities for young people to
have role models through mentoring systems. We have also got offers
of work experience opportunities from our private sector partner
to enhance the 14-19 curriculum and for them to be part of inputs
into different diploma lines as they develop. It is the added
value over and above just the building programme, but we do, as
was mentioned earlier, want to make sure that the building and
the environment becomes part of the curriculum. We are going to
have open areas where youngsters can see the energy consumption,
for example; and what our private sector partner has decided they
will do is set up competitions between the schools to look at
who is actually getting the best energy saving, for example. We
could do similar things as well through all the smart card technology
link to healthy eating, because we will be able to see, in any
week, what year seven youngsters across Burnley and Pendle were
eating and, again, look at a degree of involvement and encouragement
of young people and their families through that. The educational
transformation will not come over night, and I think if there
is one thing I would say, it is that the investment that has been
alluded to right from the start today is investment in the buildings
and the procurement. The schools above that budget that they normally
have are not being enabled to do some of the things that we ideally
need to do, and we know that we are going to have to do a lot
of work on changed management with the new schools as they become
PFI schools: because my classroom will not be my classroom any
more if another group is going to be using it in the evening.
The different ways of working by teachers currently, maybe setting
up their classroom this evening for tomorrow morning's lesson,
if another group is coming in using that—
Q87 Chairman: Teachers will have
to learn new ways of working, as most of us have to.
Ms Rawson: Yes, but they need
some help, they need some support, and it is those sorts of programmes
which are supporting the broader transformation and the broader
sustainability, for that matter, but the investment is not there
yet for some of those things and it is crucial. We are getting
to a tipping point now where there could be some falling back
from the opportunities we have on transformation, simply because
we know there are certain needs out there but, as yet, we do not
know where we are going to be able to draw the funding from to
take that forward.
Q88 Chairman: The development of
the human capital as opposed to the physical capital?
Ms Rawson: Yes, and I think that
would be one of the key messages that I would like to leave with
you about investment and what is happening. Yes, there is superb
investment in the schools, which we really welcome, but in order
for the real transformation to happen, an awful lot of other stuff
needs to happen as far as the people who are going to be working
in those buildings and the people who will be using them.
Q89 Stephen Williams: Chairman, you
have just mentioned human capital. How much of this programme
relies on the success of a wonderful building and how much of
it in terms of transforming standards and outcomes relies on innovations
in teaching?
Ms Rawson: We only need to look
at other places abroad, maybe in some under-developed countries
where they have just a space, maybe it might have a roof on. They
still manage to educate children. It is actually saying, what
is it that we want to achieve? The buildings can support that
and they do and they will give a wonderful, rich environment for
learning, but we need to have the stimulus there from the quality
of the curriculum, the teaching and learning opportunities and
all the support from multi-agencies to take forward the Every
Child Matters agenda, and those sorts of things are where
you take a lot more time. The buildings, all right, the first
ones for us are there in 2008, but we have not been able to recruit
whole new staff. We have actually got to work with the people
we have to help them move forward, and that is the other challenge,
and that is why we want as much as we can from the partnerships
we are getting to ensure that it is enhancing the curriculum and
teaching and learning as well.
Q90 Stephen Williams: Future proofing
has been mentioned a couple of times in this session. I have got
NESTA Future Lab based in my constituency in Bristol. I have spent
some time recently with projects all over the country on innovative
ways of teaching. How much have you thought about how teaching
might change into the future goes into the design of these buildings?
Mr Lloyd Jones: A lot of thought
goes into it. Part of the briefing process is to determine the
extent of change that any school anticipates. Clearly, there are
guidelines from DfES, and so on, but, as has been mentioned before
by the panel here, designing for allowing spaces to change, combine,
to become formal or less formal, to introduce more ICT, and so
on, is absolutely the bread and butter of how we set about designing
schools?
Mr Jarvis: May I add that, if
we look at it from the teaching end, we might miss a trick, and
we should be looking at it from the learning end: because what
happens in a great many secondary schools at the moment is that
there is too much teacher direction and too little learner autonomy.
What our new school designs should be doing is to teach youngsters,
to encourage youngsters, to provide opportunities for youngsters
to organise their own learning so that the teacher becomes a facilitator
rather than a didact. In that way you are educating the whole
adult as you grow them into adults rather than constraining them.
Q91 Chairman: We are coming to the
end of a major inquiry into special educational needs. How adept
are you at understanding the changes that are going on in a different
part of education that are going to influence the design of buildings?
The reason we went to this very interesting Education Village
in Darlington is because they have put a special school in the
heart of the school. A special school in the heart, a secondary
school an infant and junior, and we were very impressed with it
because it allowed special needs children to opt into different
parts of the activity of the school when appropriate. It does
seem to us that there was something that was the thing of the
future; that was going to happen. How much notice did you take
of it and how much of that did you see, Allan, when you went to
your 25 schools?
Mr Jarvis: I have not seen it
anywhere else, but I will tell you where you will see it 2008
and it is in Bradford. That is exactly what we are doing in Bradford,
both special schools for those with PMLD and SLD and also for
the hearing-impaired and visually-impaired students. So, all their
experiences will now be delivered on a campus basis where they
will be co-located with mainstream schools to which those students
will have whatever amount of access is appropriate for them to
the mainstream education and to their peers, rather than being
segregated.
Q92 Chairman: Is that happening in
your case?
Ms Rawson: Yes, within Wave 1
we have two co-located secondary special schools and a co-located
primary special school, and the policy of the county council,
wherever we are building new schools, is to seek to co-locate
special educational needs provision within the same building.
We have seen examples where people say it is a co-located school,
but actually the special school is at the bottom of the garden.
We are actually talking about, as you say, shared buildings and
some shared classrooms; so we are enabling, for example, youngsters
from the special school to share some of the science facilities,
some of the technology facilities by ensuring that the furniture
and the access is actually planned in as part and parcel of the
design.
Q93 Chairman: Are you finding that
is happening, David, as an architect?
Mr Lloyd Jones: Yes. Interestingly,
we were having this conversation in the practice yesterday. I
can see an enormous advantage in co-locating special needs schools
and secondary schools. The debate that we were having is whether
it is a good idea to incorporate primary schools within the same
set-up as well, and whether there needs to be a sense of moving
from one school to another or whether it should all be part of
the same big umbrella and pupils move with it.
Q94 Stephen Williams: An antepenultimate
question to the surveyor and the architect. We have been advised
that the average spend on the BSF project is £1,450 per square
metre as compared to £2,000 per square metre in a commercial
office environment. Does this mean the public sector has been
short-changed by the Government or the public sector is better
at getting value for money than the contractors, or are the figures
wrong perhaps?
Ms Newton: I shall start with
that. Certainly the funding that we have in Lancashire has been
formulaically driven on a square metreage per pupil basis, and
in putting forward our first bid we indicated in capital terms
what we thought we required to deliver the Building Schools for
the Future programme. We did not get everything that we asked
for. As I say, it is very much driven on a cost per pupil allowance
that is made. In terms of what we are doing in Lancashire, the
funding envelope we have is providing the schools. The county
council is having to contribute a significant amount of funding
to address the highways issues and pick up some of the abnormal
costs that have arisen that are not being funded by Partnerships
for Schools or DfES. So, we have a tension between government
policies around transport, sustainability and, when we submit
a planning application, the highways engineers are very vigorous
in terms of transport assessments, walking routes, highways improvement.
All of that is funded by the county council.
Q95 Chairman: What about yellow buses?
Ms Newton: We have looked at yellow
buses. We have actually looked at a policy for bus transportation
for children. We also, in terms of closing schools, addressed
the admissions criteria for each of our schools, and we have got
a policy where children who live over three miles away get an
allowance for their transportation, but we are having to look
at it in the context, on a county council basis, of a very tight
budget and Transport for Schools is one of the issues that is
under consideration at the moment. So, we are having to look at
cycle routes, improvements to the highways, with a view to encouraging
as many children to access school on foot as possible. The funding
we get, yes, and I think the competitive edge in terms of having
a bidding process can help drive out better value for money and
the art is keeping your preferred bidder within the funding envelope
that they bid and then making sure that going forward we achieve
value for money.
Q96 Stephen Williams: Routes to school
has been a key issue in one of the new schools that has just opened
in my constituency as well, so thank you for that. A final question,
Chairman, a general question maybe for Ms Rawson. How keen are
head teachers to have an input into completely re-organising the
design, layout and operation of their schools?
Ms Rawson: Pivotal, and, in order
to enable head teachers to do that, one of the things that the
county council invested in, last year we released the head teacher's
designate for a day a week to plan together and work with all
the different agencies they need to work with and this year, from
August 2005, they have been totally off timetable. We have set
them up in a base together so that they have a shared working
area. We have constant work together to look at how they take
forward the collaborative vision, and they have then been available
to work with architects, with our own colleagues, to take forward
the Building Schools for the Future opportunity, because, again,
we know we are not going to pass this way again with the same
amount of money and, therefore, investing in those head teachers
has been a crucial aspect of the county council's commitment to
making this work.
Chairman: We have now got to look at
Academies in the last few minutes.
Q97 Paul Holmes: Allan Jarvis was
saying a while back about examples of idiosyncratic heads who
have taken the design of their new school off in perhaps not the
best of directions. Academies, it would seem, are even more prone
to this because they are the private project of whichever millionaire
happens to throw £2 million in to buy them, and whichever
architect gets to design has got £25-30 million of taxpayers'
money to spend to their heart's content. We have had lots of press
stories about disastrous Academy projects with glass classrooms
that are too hot or too cold to work in and huge open-plan design
suites which the teachers do not want, and so forth. Is this criticism
justified?
Mr Lloyd Jones: I do not pretend
to visit all the Academies. All I can do is to say that we have
recently designed an Academy in Bermondsey and the Committee is
welcome to visit it at any time and inspect it for themselves.
We feel it works very well, and so do the head teacher and the
staff, and the pupils really enjoy it. You are welcome to see
it.
Q98 Chairman: Which one is that?
Mr Lloyd Jones: It is called City
of London Academy. The sponsor is the City of London and it is
in Bermondsey.
Chairman: We know it.
Q99 Paul Holmes: Michael, have you
any comment?
Mr Buchanan: I think it is an
interesting question. It depends to a degree on the sponsor, I
think. We are working with one of the project managers of the
Bridge Academy in Hackney, the sponsor of which is the United
Bank of Switzerland, whose interest in it is not for any personal
gratification, very much in a local social responsibility building
on other work that they have done in East London and bringing
to it very clear approaches to business practice, financial management
and ICT management, and so on, I think, in a very refreshing way
which will add enormously to the fitness for purpose of the building.
I do not think it is necessarily the case for every other Academy
where, in some cases, there were grand ambitions that were not
perhaps as well grounded as they might have been.
Mr Jarvis: You asked me earlier
on what my dream-team is for procuring, designing and developing
and building and opening a new school. If you think about the
Academies model, no single element of that dream-team is present,
necessarily, in the development of a new Academy, and what I think
is a worry with the programme is it is not just open to idiosyncrasy,
it is also the fact that you do not have an established constituency
to which you can appeal in terms of either students who are moving
from the existing learning environment to a new one or a head
teacher already in post who can advise on the process, and so
there is a risk there that some mistakes may be made.
Paul Holmes: Given that the average cost
of the Academies so far has been about £25 million, compared
to an average of about £14 million for a standard new state
school, is the extra money worth it? Is the taxpayer getting value
for money from the examples that you have seen?
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