Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
MR DAVID
KESTER, MS
HILARY COTTAM
AND MR
JOHN SORRELL
3 JULY 2006
Q120 Chairman: Can we hit all the
buttons in terms of good design? Can we have good design that
is aesthetically pleasing, good design which stimulates good learning
and sustainable design which cuts down the carbon footprint on
the planet? Are they compatible?
Mr Sorrell: Yes, absolutely. If
it is going to be good design, it needs to address all those things.
I really do think it is important to make the point that good
design is design that performs its function brilliantly, but in
this case means well-built buildings which also are going to inspire
not just the children but also the teachers, the local community
who may well use the school. In many cases now we are going to
find schools which are going to be available for community use,
much longer hours of use for the building. Good design in the
end is about form and function; it has to be all those things
if it is going to be good. In fact I would go further than that:
good is not good enough. It should be excellent because this is
for our children, it is for the future of the country. Mediocre
is not good enough. Even good is not good enough, it has to be
absolutely excellent and there is no reason why it should not
be because we have the designers in this country, some of the
best architects in the world, we have the best designers of products
and schools need things like storage systems designed brilliantly,
clothing designed, uniforms and so on. There is absolutely no
reason why this should not be very, very good indeed.
Chairman: Let us draw down a bit more
on pupil involvement and transformation.
Q121 Mr Wilson: Mr Sorrell, when
the Chairman asked you whether buildings mattered, your reply
was that great design inspires you. Where is the evidence for
that? Where is your evidence base for making that assertion?
Mr Sorrell: Forty years' experience
of working in the world of design and seeing how it affects companies,
people in the public sector, individuals and talking to literally
thousands of children over the last six years. They know how much
design influences them. For example, they will talk about how
colour in their school affects their mood; if you get the colours
wrong, you can actually affect their mood in school. They know
absolutely how a building, which when you approach it has something
exciting about it and which is visually pleasing, is going to
make them feel better about going inside it. There is evidence
in other areas as well, but in terms of schools, if you talk to
the children you will find out how inspirational design is to
them.
Q122 Mr Wilson: With the greatest
of respect, that is very anecdotal and we are talking about spending
£45 billion of public money. Where is the evidence on which
you can base the spending of that sum of money?
Mr Sorrell: I cannot put any hard
facts or statistical evidence on the table in front of you, but
a very, very tiny amount of money is spent on design out of the
programme; 1% of the life costs, absolutely tiny, miniscule. If
I put it another way, we could all get up in the morning and say
we are going to go out and design these schools really badly,
we are going to design schools which are basically not going to
function very well, the design is not going to work for the build,
so they will fall down fairly quickly and when people walk towards
them they feel gloom and despair because they will look so absolutely
appalling. We are not going to do that. What we are actually going
to do is our very best to make them inspirational because we absolutely
know, even though I cannot put statistical evidence in front of
you, that they will inspire and they will bring much better results.
Q123 Mr Wilson: You mentioned some
companies which had been inspired by the buildings they were in.
Can you just give me one or two examples?
Mr Sorrell: If you look at companies
like Apple, you do not have to go too far from here to see Apple
spending money on design and designing things well. Everything
is designed anyway. Someone decides what it is going to be like;
that is design. The question is whether you want good design or
whether you want mediocre or poor design because in the end someone
makes the decisions. Every single thing in this room is designed
by somebody. Somebody has made those decisions and the same applies
to schools or office blocks or houses or anything else. With someone
like Apple, if you go and look at the Apple store in the middle
of London or look at the one in New York, you will see that they
use design not just for their products, because they believe that
by designing their products better they will obviously make more
money, they also do exactly the same with their buildings because
they want those buildings not just to function well, but to inspire
their consumers. There is no difference if the consumer happens
to be a child and it is public money being spent rather than the
companies, because the profit which we shall make is in the future
of this country through those children being much better citizens,
knowing more and being able to help the country more in the future.
Mr Kester: I should like to come
in with two points there. One is the actual impact evidence around
design and the value of design and there is a mass of very good
impact evidence on the value of design.
Q124 Chairman: In schools?
Mr Kester: Just generally right
across public and private sector and schools are no different
from hospitals, they are no different from businesses. If you
apply design effectively to a problem, you can get good results.
You can look at a tracking survey, which was done on FTSE 100
companies in fact, which shows that over a 10-year period companies
which used design effectively and strategically performed 200%
above the market average. However, the point I want to make is
that actually design is not a panacea. I should go back to the
issue of what the problem is that you want to solve. Actually
it is not about throwing design at it, this is not a £45
billion design project, this is a £45 billion refurbishment
and build programme of schools. The question is what you want
out of it and what you are asking of design. If you know what
you are asking, you might get some good solutions. If I may give
an example, there is a very, very good example in one of the schools
that we cite, in San Diego, where the local community was looking
to foster a sense of self-determination amongst its pupils, it
was looking to maximise pupil involvement and it was also looking
at the issue of sustainability in schools. What was their answer?
Their answer was to convert a Navy warehouse, not a new-build
school. They focused totally on the internal environment of that
school and when they looked to the best in office design, the
best practices in terms of hot-desking, all sorts of new techniques
that we all know and we share in our daily world if we walk around
business, they took that in to that school environment and they
have had phenomenal results and attainment. It is really about
what you are trying to achieve and then you can ask the designers
to come in and work to that brief.
Ms Cottam: I just want to say
that we have had a relatively short start on this programme so
there are not a lot of results yet. School Works have developed
quite a good ex-post evaluation which I imagine they will talk
about, but I started School Works in the first school we did,
Kingsdale, five years ago and that has been evaluated by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
They have looked at what has been the educational benefit, not
just of the design spend on the school but really critically to
the design process that got them to that good design. They have
shown that that has added educational value; Kingsdale was officially
a failing school and is now one of Britain's top 20 most improved
schools still with a very difficult catchment. So there is some
concrete evidence, but we are only just beginning to get it out
because we are only just beginning to measure this relatively
new programme.
Q125 Mr Wilson: Did you involve children
in the design of that school?
Ms Cottam: Yes. What we did was
to have a programme where we worked with the children who were
at the school, their parents, the staff, the senior management
team and the dinner ladies, everybody in the school, the surrounding
community who did not have their children at the school were looking
at that as well. We redesigned—this is critical—the
school building, the management system, the system of pastoral
care and the curriculum because what is critical is that the design
process makes sure that all those things are working together
and out of that has been a very strong educational outcome which
you cannot ever say was just because of the design spend; though
obviously it is in part related to that. There was an independent
PriceWaterhouseCoopers' evaluation which showed learning benefit
to that investment.
Q126 Mr Wilson: John, you talked
earlier about common issues children got involved in, in particular
you said they did not like being herded like cattle into the dinner
queues and they wanted covered space when they went out so that
is something you would like to see designed into schools. Where
do we stop this pandering to young people in schools? Where do
we draw the line? Do we start offering them manicures when they
ask for them?
Mr Sorrell: It is a thought, is
it not? I do not think so.
Q127 Mr Wilson: How far are you prepared
to go?
Mr Sorrell: I should just ask
the children. What you will find, if you do ask them, is that
they are incredibly pragmatic and people who talk to us about
joinedupdesignforschools say "Surely when you ask kids what
they would like to improve in their schools they all talk about
putting in coca-cola machines?" They do not. What they talk
about are really pragmatic things like toilets which are hygienic
and where they do not get bullied, a civilised lunchtime, things
like social spaces which are not in the corridor in the corner
or on the steps at the backdoor but which are actually designed
as part of the school life. My answer really is the answer the
children would give you, which is that they are pragmatic about
what they want. They actually do not ask for that much and they
certainly do not ask for any more than anyone in this room would
expect in their working environment. You do not have to go as
far as manicures, but you do have to think about what school life
is like for children and listen very hard to what they say about
it because their perspective is completely different. I shall
give you an example. Whereas an architect will look at open plan
and worry about things like acoustic separation and perhaps noise
being a problem, a child might look at open plan and see it as
a way they are not going to get bullied because the teacher can
see lots of people and they are not going to get beaten up. Looking
at it from the children's point of view is very important and
they will not ask you for those kinds of things.
Q128 Mr Wilson: Does it matter what
age the child is? If it is a new school, it could be a five-year-old
as much as a 16-year-old?
Mr Sorrell: Yes. We work with
children from the age of four to 18 and we really have not found
any difference in their approach except of course the young ones
cannot write briefs, so they do displays or they put on a play
and perform it, which is very unusual for an architect. In 30
years in business, no-one ever wrote a play and performed a brief
for me, but the children do this and they really can get their
points across. Even the youngest ones have very strong feelings
about the environment they are in and they know how much it affects
them.
Q129 Mr Wilson: How likely is it
that a school, in a sense built by five- to 18-year-olds, is going
to stand the test of time? What children think is the thing to
do today, in 10 or 20 years' time may be completely different.
How will these schools stand the test of time?
Mr Sorrell: They are not designing
it. What they are is a part of the client stakeholder group and
on the Building Schools for the Future programme there are lots
of people on the client side.
Q130 Mr Wilson: But you are saying
they are influential in the decisions and the design.
Mr Sorrell: They should be; I
am not saying they are at the moment. That is one of the things
I am asking for because they are not, at the moment, as properly
involved as I believe they should be and the problem comes when
people only pay lip service to consulting the pupils. Very often
what happens is the school is designed basically and then the
kids are brought together for an hour, they are shown the designs
of the focus group and at the end of it boxes are ticked. What
I am calling for is a much, much deeper involvement of pupils
in the overall client stakeholder group, and it is a big group
because you have head teachers, teachers, parents, governors,
local community, the LAs. It is a very, very big stakeholder group
on the client side. The ones I plead for are the children because
they are the ones who are likely to be left out of the discussion.
It is making a big mistake if we do not involve them properly.
Of course they are not designing the schools, what they are doing
is helping to inform the people who are designing them and that
is the whole point. If you create a great vision, a great brief
and you have a great designer working with that great brief then
you have a good chance of getting a good result.
Mr Kester: I just want to build
on what John was saying because it is so right and so important
and in design this is often referred to as the user insight. Every
single major business that uses design in the world is looking
to understand its user, so that it can actually deliver to the
real deep needs that the user has. In this context obviously the
pupils are not the only customer and stakeholder; teachers are,
the local community is, we as a society are because we are actually
looking to have high-attaining young people coming through our
schools. Design has all sorts of good and clever techniques to
get those insights out. You are not necessarily asking what children
want and just giving it to them: you are trying to find out what
we need. Designers are very, very good at that and a lot of the
sort of work that Hilary has been running, through our work not
only with schools but also in areas of health and other areas,
has actually been to bring some of those insights to the fore
as early as possible, so that those can shape your idea of what
a school can be and bring those possibilities to the table.
Q131 Mr Wilson: I think you would
agree that most businesses do not design the buildings that they
work from and there is probably not one employee that I could
identify or you could identify that had any involvement in designing
their place of work, yet they still do a fantastic job.
Mr Kester: Actually I dispute
that strongly. I might say that of the external fascia of a building,
and of course this place is a very good example of a building
in which a lot of people had a say both externally and internally,
but certainly in a well-run organisation you would be involving
and consulting and understanding the needs that you have of your
internal workforce when you are constantly revising and redesigning
your internal environment to maximise productivity. You would
be looking at the adjacencies of different work teams. You would
be looking at light, you would be looking at the sort of workspaces
that you need, the number of meeting rooms you need, a whole array
of different issues are brought to bear and any sensible business
is consulting and working with its internal team on a regular
basis, particularly at times when it is actually refurbishing
or changing or moving and when it does not, we all see the terrible
things we complain about when we work in places which did not
consult, did not understand and it all goes terribly pear-shaped.
Q132 Paul Holmes: The last great
wave of school building was the 1960s and to save cost and to
spread the money around at that time a lot of them were built
on the clasp system where you have prefabricated panels bolted
together, some of the new universities like York at the time,
and they sat there for the next 40 years as fairly brutalist examples
of 1960s architecture, but they got more bang for their buck by
doing it that way. Are we getting the right balance, if we spend
money in this second wave of school building on design rather
than on building more new schools for example?
Ms Cottam: May I answer that question?
There is a fallacy that good design somehow costs more. If we
take architecture, architects take a percentage of the costs.
Whether you have a good architect or a bad architect, it is going
to cost you the same amount of money so the question is: is your
process delivering good architecture? Similarly with the kind
of process that we have been working with at the Design Council,
the design process is about trying to link what is a learning
vision, trying to make sure that that investment that you are
going to make anywhere in a building delivers learning outcomes.
What we have seen internationally is that if you spend the time
and the money upfront getting that brief right and getting that
learning vision right, then the actual school building itself
is cheaper. Then the whole procurement, like any project, goes
very smoothly because everybody knows what is wanted and what
they are signed up to at the beginning and you deliver something
better for learning and a cheaper process at the final end. It
is not like an add-on, it is in there anyway: it is just whether
it is being well done or not.
Mr Sorrell: You are asking a really
important question because there is an attitude in this country
about design which always queries and for my entire career of
40 years in the world of design I have spent a lot of time trying
to justify why good design is important. I know that the man behind
me, Richard Simmons, will talk when he gives evidence about a
publication CABE have just produced and a campaign they are running
which is called The Cost of Bad Design. What I should like to
do is talk about the cost of bad design and I do not just mean
cost in terms of money, because if you design something badly
then you will probably end up paying a great deal more in the
long run to look after it and maintain it, than you would if you
designed it well, but also the cost on people's lives and the
impact on them. If you really design things badly, then you can
really mess people's lives up. If you think about houses, hospitals,
schools, all the things in the public sector which are so important,
if they are designed badly, they can really impact on people's
welfare. I agree entirely with what Hilary said, but we ought
to turn the question round sometimes and say "Just how much
does bad design cost us in this country?". We certainly cannot
afford to have bad designs in our schools' programme.
Mr Kester: The corollary to that
is that there is a real risk that good design and good design
process will not get integrated into the Building Schools for
the Future programme. That is really the risk: will we actually
be able to integrate the best that we know of design? In the end
this building programme is happening, it is rolling out, it has
a timetable against it, there are some risks in the system and
everybody is going to watch out that those risks do not end up
messing the whole system up. There is a real possibility that
we shall not get the innovation and creativity that we really
want. If we want to have great schools that are fit not just for
the next 10 years, but 50 or 100 years—and of course our
Victorian schools have lasted over 100 years—then what are
we actually going to do now that is going to ensure that the sort
of schools that we creating are going to endure and support us
in the long term? That means some really smart, clever thinking
upfront and once the ball is rolling and the procurement exercise
has started, it is going to be too late, which is where we have
been advocating early design processes.
Q133 Paul Holmes: I agree with much
of what you have said, but just to play devil's advocate again,
I can think of schools across Derbyshire that I worked in as a
teacher and visited and I can think of a wave of 1920s schools
that were built to the same blueprint by the same architect in
Ilkeston and in Buxton and in Chesterfield, all over Derbyshire.
You just walk in and it is absolutely identical to the ones you
have been in before. Then you have the 1960s wave, which are much
more badly designed but again were absolutely identical. Surely
if you build 500 schools over the next few years, all with different
design teams and architects, that has to use up more money less
efficiently than if you have a team of architects who come up
with one good design and all schools are built to the same blueprint.
Mr Sorrell: The first point to
make is that different parts of the country, as we all know, have
their own special characteristics and it would be an absolute
tragedy if we rolled out the blueprint of one standard design
which everybody uses.
Chairman: Tesco's do it, why should we
not?
Q134 Paul Holmes: That is why we
should not.
Mr Sorrell: Absolutely. Perhaps
I should not go any further on that one. First of all, there is
absolutely no point in doing it because we do not have to do it
that way and if we can get individuality in different schools
in different places, then not only would it be appropriate for
the environment, but it would also be appropriate for the children
and the teachers who are there. However, where we learn lessons
and we get good practice and best practice, then obviously we
can take that and copy it in other places, but we shall still
need to adjust it for size, location, numbers and all the rest
of it. For example, I hope what we shall start to see, and I think
we are starting to see it already, is that if you find a school
which has really cracked the problem of 1,400 students at lunchtime
by creating an absolutely wonderful lunchtime civilised experience,
brilliantly done environmentally and, by the way, the food as
well, then I should like everyone to look at that and see how
you can replicate the thinking, even though the physical design
will almost certainly need to be different in different places
because we do have different numbers in places, we do have different
locations. It would be very inappropriate to have a thatched mediaeval
cottage-type school sitting just round the corner here in Westminster;
you would not expect to do that. There are all kinds of reasons
why it would not be appropriate to standardise all schools, but
we can learn a great deal from best practice and that is an important
part of the programme over the next year or two. We cannot wait
too long to learn, but as good examples come up and that is why
we need, good examples very, very fast.
Q135 Chairman: Do we not already
have them with the Academies?
Mr Sorrell: We have some examples,
but we need a lot more.
Mr Kester: We need to see examples
from around the world and not just think little UK in that sense.
There are fantastic examples of where new learning environments
have been created abroad and we need to be able to share best
practice wherever it is, so that we can disseminate that. It needs
to be easy to get hold of and at the moment it is not. We held
a conference last year for head teachers and showed them some
of the possibilities that are being created around the world at
the moment, new schools. We also took them through one or two
exercises which were all about how you kick off the design process,
all of them were saying "Oh, my God", but the ones who
were going through it were saying "If only I had known this
a year ago". So knowledge sharing is so important in this
and we need light touch simple tools which can really ensure that
any head teacher in any school that is going through a major programme
like this has really good examples at their fingertips. In answer
to your question, there are three distinct visions which need
to coalesce when we are building a school: a national vision for
education, a local and regional vision for education. Often the
regional issues are so different in the North East from London
and there might be issues of social exclusion or rural against
city and those issues then translate and there is a whole different
set of design problems. Then there will be individual school issues
which really depend on the catchment area of the school and what
that school is trying to achieve. Is this school going to be a
music school? What sort of school is it? How is it going to define
itself? There are three different visions and they need to come
together in different ways then around the country.
Q136 Paul Holmes: Some people have
suggested that this opportunity of a whole wave of brand new schools
gives us the chance to build exciting new learning environments
which are 21st century, which are modern, which are go-ahead.
Is there not a danger of fossilising whatever the fad of the moment
is into a building that is going to be there for 40 years? For
example, one Academy which has been praised in the press for its
design innovation has got open-plan classrooms and yet that is
exactly the sort of trendy 1960s teaching that everybody was condemning
a few years ago as being at the root of everything that is wrong
in society.
Mr Kester: I should agree. There
are real risks in setting everything in stone. We do need to be
looking at what a sustainable school is and a sustainable school
does need to be a school that looks to the long term and perhaps
therefore looks at its own mutability and builds that in. Steven
Heppell, a renowned expert on this, sometimes does actually refer
to the Lego school. We perhaps do need to look at schools which
will react and can change according to changes in technology,
our own understanding of the way that people learn, which also
shifts over time, and what we are trying to achieve out of our
education system.
Q137 Paul Holmes: In the earlier
answers there was a suggestion that not enough was being spent
on design. The figure given was 1% of the cost over the entire
life of the school. We have had it suggested to us that, first
of all on the timescale involved in the procurement process, when
designers are making a pitch to a consortium they might only have
13 weeks to get across what they want and to try to win the bid.
Is 13 weeks long enough to have serious input on design?
Ms Cottam: No, definitely not
from the point of view of working with the wider school community
and, to go back to the learning vision, there is a massive amount
of change coming in in what is needed from nought to 19 and if
you are going to work out how that really relates to the capital
investment, a lot longer is needed. We recommend a design process
starts up to a year before any kind of capital programme starts
to roll forward.
Mr Kester: It is quite possible
that that sort of design intervention that happens early may not
involve the architect who is ultimately commissioned to build
the school.
Ms Cottam: It probably would not.
Mr Kester: It probably does not.
In cases where we have been working with schools, this is about
building and understanding what is possible, what we could have,
what we are trying to create here and really building a common
vision locally of what that is so that then, when you do brief
an architect, you are really able to communicate that very, very
clearly as a damn good brief.
Ms Cottam: If you have 13 weeks,
what you are going to get is a secondary school, nought to 16,
that is open from 9am to 3.30pm 192 days a year and that is it.
That is where you are spending a lot of money for not very much
in terms of the limitations as to what you are going to get out
of that building.
Q138 Paul Holmes: It was also suggested,
in relation to that question, that in making the pitch you not
only have only 13 weeks but also that the money for the design
part of the concept was perhaps 10% of the total cost with most
of the emphasis being on the best value, the cheapest options
available, the construction costs and so forth. Is that true?
John talked about 1% on the whole-life cost but is a 10% figure
true for the actual design and build part?
Ms Cottam: I am not sure what
the percentage is, but I know that there are all sorts of things.
One of the things about this being a sustainable schools inquiry
is that there is also quite of lot of work which can be done on
the capital investment versus the recurrent expenditure and where
you say that by having some sort of investment now it could be
more expensive but save the footprint overprint. Those things
also have to be worked out far too fast and there are many structural
issues which make it impossible to make those gains.
Mr Sorrell: I come back to the
point about attitude again. There is an enormous concentration
on things to do with time and cost which is just a ticket to the
game. Of course things have to be done on time and for the money,
but to do things brilliantly and deliver the kind of excellence
which we have to have does take time. It is a combination of creating
the right vision and brief but then working together with the
architects, the designers, in what we call the conversation to
make sure that that conversation reaches the conclusion which
we can all be very proud of. Yes, you have to create enough time
to do the job properly; it is ridiculous not to do so.
Q139 Paul Holmes: What percentage
should it be, 10%, 15%, 5%?
Mr Sorrell: It is actually very
difficult to answer that question. I should be happy to give you
a paper about it afterwards, if that is okay?
|
