Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-160)
MR DAVID
KESTER, MS
HILARY COTTAM
AND MR
JOHN SORRELL
3 JULY 2006
Q140 Paul Holmes: Hilary, you just
said something about the trade-off on different issues such as
spending a bit more now but saving money over 10, 20, 30 years
of the life of the school, but not being able to build that in
because of the timescale of arguing the case. One school we visited
was an excellent design and the staff and pupils liked it. However,
the school council, the pupils, said to us that they were actually
quite disappointed because they were told it was about sustainable
schools but they had no solar power, for example, solar panels
on the roof, because it would cost too much upfront, even though
the experience is that 10 years down the line, it starts to save
money for the building. Is that a common experience?
Ms Cottam: Yes. I hope that the
Committee will be asking for evidence from Jonathan Porritt, who
will able to talk much more about what we are building and what
those difficulties are. Actually the issues go deeper, not only
that we cannot save in terms of the footprint, but we could also
generate power into local communities from schools; it could be
a cost recovery system. We are able to look at none of that at
the moment in the frameworks in which schools are operating.
Q141 Paul Holmes: Whose fault is
that? Is that the procurement system as dictated by the Government
who are providing money? Is it the fact that the construction
firms have too much influence and the Local Education Partnerships?
Where is the fault on that?
Ms Cottam: Again it is a very
complex web of institutional arrangements. Our evidence, which
we shall submit to the Committee, can speak to that, which probably
would be best because to unpick that now is very complicated.
[1]
Q142 Helen Jones: Education is going
to change fairly rapidly in the coming years. We hear a lot about
personalisation and we could see new methods of delivering learning.
How can we ensure that our thoughts about what will happen in
the future are actually built into the design process and how
can we future-proof schools against the changes that will happen
very rapidly in the education world in the future?
Mr Kester: Without wishing to
sound like a cracked record, it is back to the same point really
which is to learn from the specialists, the teachers, the educationalists
that we have in this country about what we really are trying to
create as a vision for learning, what sort of techniques, what
sort of education we are going to create for our young people.
Are we trying to foster self-reliance amongst our young people?
Are we trying to encourage creativity and the generation of ideas
in our schools? What sort of educational experience is it going
to be like? We talk now about a 14-19-year-old agenda where people
may be moving across different sorts of educational institutions.
What is that going to feel like, how are you going to achieve
it? Are you going to move from your beautifully built glass box
into a crummy run-down FE college for some of your lessons? What
is this really going to feel like as a totality? We must have
that sense of a national vision, but we must have a sense at a
local level of what that educational experience is going to be
like for a young person. We can fashion that and that is part
of the brief: if you know what you are trying to create, you can
fashion that. As long as we do not lock it down—and that
comes back to the previous point—and say that there is only
one way to do it and that is to lay your school out like this
and you teach it like that, but actually build flexibility into
our schools, we shall be okay.
Q143 Helen Jones: If we are going
to do that, it requires two things, does it not? It requires heads
and local authorities and others involved in the design process
to have a sense of what good design can deliver in educational
terms. It also requires the designers to have some knowledge of
what changes we expect in education in the future. Do you think
both sides yet have that required sense of what good design can
do and how it can work with education to deliver better outcomes?
Ms Cottam: All the work that we
have done has been with inter-disciplinary teams to foster that.
It is obviously critical that both sides learn and this also goes
back to the previous question about 13 weeks, because there is
a quite a lot of learning and then those teams can also share
the learning. At the moment there is not good enough understanding
on each side. Another thing that is underlying many questions
that come up is that there is not a real investment in an evaluation
tool for ex-post evaluation so that learning can be shared from
both sides going forward. There is a huge amount of knowledge.
When you are talking about future-proofing, if we just think about
the way that learning has changed since the 1950s, even if we
could build schools which encapsulate that and think about the
whole way we understand cognitive behaviour and things like that
very differently now to 50 years ago, if we could make schools
address that, we would have moved forward, never mind what the
future-proofing is going to be. A lot of those things are technologically
based, they are about flexibility within systems, they would allow
for further future-proofing into the years to come.
Mr Sorrell: We cannot be at all
complacent about this and this is not easy. If we do not actually
deliberately address the issue that you are raising, this will
be a programme which is about delivering physical environments
for kids to go to every day rather than the kind of flexible spaces
with potential to change as we discover new things over the coming
years. What I believe is very important is that over the next
two to three years, a vital period, we need to be looking very,
very, very hard at this and looking at and learning what is developing,
as the visions are created, the briefs are created, the early
schools are being done. This has to be a central question as we
are doing it, because we shall learn as we go along what we need
to do to create the kind of flexibility for those schools of the
future, to do a future-proofing you are describing. We should
not be at all sure at this moment that we have got it right, but
we could over the next two to three years because in a way what
we are into is a kind of phase of prototyping. We have a 10-15-year
programme here. If we think about the next two or three years
as a period where we are going to learn an enormous amount from
what we are doing, then we could benefit from that enormously.
Your question is absolutely vital.
Q144 Helen Jones: But it is not just
about what happens to the young people within school time. Somebody
said earlier that if we get this wrong, it will just be a building
where people go to. We are also looking at extended schools, we
are looking through developments in the youth service to use a
lot of the facilities in schools for community use, whether it
is for young people or for adults outside time. It always seemed
to me very bizarre that we have all these facilities that are
locked up most of the time. That has to influence the design,
does it not? How do you think it is best to involve the wider
community in the design of schools? Do you have any examples of
good practice on how that has been done and how we created buildings
which can be used out of school hours with all the necessary security
that that needs in place and so on? Can you tell the Committee
about any good practice in that sphere?
Ms Cottam: May I answer that on
three levels? One is rather like the 12 points that you were talking
about, the colour for example. There are some very simple things
about involving the community. For instance, if you build buildings
where the outside walls are on the street, it is very easy to
open them up to the communities after hours and you do not need
huge amounts of staff time to police boundaries, really simple
things which can be learned and can be transferred from school
to school. That is one thing. The second thing is to fund a design
process as we have been talking about, to make sure the community
is involved so it does actually meet community needs. It sounds
incredibly simple, but we have seen time and time again that this
does not happen. The third thing is back to my opening point which
was about a learning vision. The one thing that I have to keep
coming back to is that it is my concern that this is still a schools
rebuilding programme, that this does not mesh properly with the
vision that is from nought to 19 and is about extended schools,
is about community learning, lifelong learning, the Every Child
Matters agenda. We have all these very good policy agendas,
but it is still not clear how BSF is fitted into this wider learning
agenda.
Q145 Chairman: What did you get out
of Kingsdale? You referred to that research and you talked then
about the management systems, curriculum issues alongside the
design. What came out of that?
Ms Cottam: A couple of things
came out of it. We have to remember this started seven years ago,
so actually seven years ago, saying that you should not divorce
capital spend from your learning objectives was completely radical.
We have moved on a long way because actually people now think
that those two should be joined together. It is just that the
structures are not in place and the incentives are not in place
yet within the BSF programme to join them together. The other
thing is that when we started Kingsdale, the things that came
out of the community practice were things like extended schools,
community initiatives that were not then in the policy agenda.
We were able to feed a lot of that into the policy agenda. It
is now being reflected back but has not been re-integrated into
the loop of the capital programme.
Q146 Paul Holmes: We have had figures
given to us that, under the Building Schools for the Future programme,
roughly £1,450 per square metre of school is allocated, whereas
a typical office block would get £2,000 per square metre.
Do those figure square from your experience? Does that mean we
are valuing schools at only being 75% of the worth of an office
block?
Mr Sorrell: Not far out.
Q147 Chairman: Is that good enough?
Mr Sorrell: I always say the same
thing. Nothing but the best is good enough for our kids. There
is an attitude again that because it is for children, then it
does not have to be of the same quality as it would be for adults.
Q148 Mr Chaytor: I just sense that
each of you started your answers arguing in one direction and
then in response to Helen's questions, you have done a bit of
U-turn. This afternoon you started out saying how important design
was and almost arguing the case for using the BSF programme to
build a series of iconic buildings and then you finish off by
saying you have no idea what the future is going to bring so you
have to have complete flexibility. I do not understand how you
can argue both cases simultaneously. If I may come back to the
Tesco point, the point about a supermarket is that not every supermarket
looks the same from the outside, because they all vary to some
degree and some are more beautiful than others. The point is surely
that the inside is infinitely flexible. Is that not the point
about schools? We do not want to design things fixed in stone,
however beautiful they may be, when we do not know what the next
50 years are going to be. That is the legacy we have from 40 years
ago, is it not? Things were fixed in stone for a set of circumstances
that no longer apply. How do you reconcile your passion for beautiful
iconic buildings with your recognition that there has to be infinite
flexibility for the next half century?
Mr Kester: In a way I think I
miscommunicated if I put across the view that I was trying to
argue for lots of beautiful iconic buildings up and down the country.
There can be a case for a beautiful building being a school. That
can actually be very important. We have lots of examples in other
areas, not just schools for a moment. If you think of Will Alsop's
design for Peckham library, it is an iconic building, it is a
great statement of civic pride and also a statement of what a
library can be. In the same way, you can do the same with our
schools. This is surely all about what goes on on the inside,
not what it looks like on the outside and actually that is very
much at the heart of what the Design Council has been working
on. We called our work learning-environments work, not building
projects, because it is all about the flexibility, the style of
learning and how, when we build or refurbish a school, we support
the teaching and good learning, but that is not to say you cannot
also have a beautiful building which can give people lots of pride
in the place that they go to every day. That can be a wonderful
thing but that should not be the objective.
Q149 Mr Chaytor: Is it not the case
that the focus on the attractiveness of the building should largely
be on the outside and the inside should just have maximum flexibility?
Why not build a series of beautiful shapes?
Mr Kester: Indeed; that would
be the example I gave earlier and we should be happy to provide
the Committee with information on the San Diego school which is
indeed a warehouse. It is an old Navy warehouse. As such it does
not particularly make a brave architectural statement on the landscape
because it was an old Navy warehouse which has been refurbished
of course, but on the inside it is a fantastic and innovative
learning space which is very flexible and brings to bear a lot
of the best techniques for the teachers and supports them in doing
what they want to do. That is actually very brave and we should
be learning those sorts of lessons in Britain.
Mr Sorrell: It is not either/or;
it has to be all of the things you are talking about. Of course,
the way these buildings are going to function is absolutely vital
and if they do not function well, then they are not going to work.
The simple fact is that we have to do the very best we can now
to get us as far as we can into the future, find what kind of
flexibility is required and design that in. Of course we have
to do that and we do not know all of the answers now, but if we
work really hard and if we really focus on it over the next two
or three years, we could get a lot of the answers that we are
still searching for about the kind of flexibility that is required.
Just to finish my point, I actually also believe that the buildings
of course should look absolutely wonderful because then they are
inspirational, they are the kind of buildings which make people
say they are proud of their community. If you design an ugly,
boring, dull, horrible school, what does that say about your community?
Of course they should be beautiful, they should delight everybody
who sees them and goes to them and uses them. For me it is not
a question of either/or, we have to do all of it.
Chairman: I just must chip in that we
have some of the worst domestic architecture that I have ever
seen in this country and perhaps we just get what we deserve.
Q150 Mr Chaytor: That is my follow-on
question really. It is not a great endorsement of British architecture
that we still have not learned how to build a decent school. We
have been building schools for 100-odd years and you are saying
we still need to see how it goes over the next two or three years.
Why is it we are so poor or why is it that we have not learned
how to build a school that combines functionality and aesthetic
value?
Mr Sorrell: As has been pointed
out earlier, it is a long time since we have done anything like
this. If you talk to the architects—and there are some older
architects who worked on the schools in the 1960s—they will
tell you about the criteria then. They were not designing schools
to last more than 30 or 40 years. That was what they were told
was needed. We are in a different situation now. We are not saying
we only want these schools to last 30 or 40 years. We want them
to last much longer than that so there are different criteria.
Some good schools are emerging. If you drive up into north London
past Chalk Farm and look to the right, you will see an extraordinary
looking building which is a school. If you go inside it, you will
find it functions well, build quality is not bad and it is a very
interesting example of what can be done. You might ask how flexible
it is going to be when new methods of learning are developed over
the next 20 or 30 years and the answer is that it probably is
not as flexible as it needs to be. We could go to look at other
examples where we would probably come to the same conclusions.
Chairman: You must flag up any school
you think we should visit.
Q151 Mr Chaytor: May I ask specifically
about the building specifications, particularly the BREEAM standard.
All the new schools are supposed to comply with the BREEAM "very
good" standard. That is the case, is it not? Is that "very
good" good enough? Is it the case that within the BREEAM
standard, you can score very highly on one of the criteria at
the expense of others? You can score highly on water management
but be hopeless on energy use. Is that how it works?
Mr Sorrell: There is a real expert
behind me on this. Richard Simmons really knows about this subject.
Mr Kester: I have to say I am
not an expert on BREEAM, but the only point I would want to raise,
because BREEAM quite clearly does focus on the narrower environmental
issues of a school, waste, energy consumption et cetera, is that
I am not sure whether it really goes far enough because I have
not got that detailed analysis to hand. What it does not do is
take a broad view of sustainability.
Q152 Mr Chaytor: What are the other
criteria?
Mr Kester: If you take the environmental
view—and it would be great to have someone like Jonathan
here—if you take the broader view of sustainability, you
would be looking at balancing the environmental issues alongside
the social benefits and economic benefits and you only really
pull off sustainability, a sustainable school, when you have those
three in harmony. Ultimately of course, you could argue for the
most fantastic environmentally-thought-through school but if it
is far too expensive to afford, we are not going to be able to
do it. On the other hand, if the environmental benefits are to
the detriment of the local community or the teaching experience,
that also would not be good. Somehow one always has to bring those
three into balance.
Q153 Mr Chaytor: On the economic
criterion, to what extent do you think that lifecycle costs should
be a factor in the initial design brief?
Mr Kester: Completely.
Q154 Mr Chaytor: Do you think they
have been in schools built so far, like the first Academies for
example?
Mr Kester: I should probably have
to come back to you on that to give a detailed answer on that,
but we can do. We shall be providing you with our evidence and
we shall be very happy to do that. We are providing evidence around
BREEAM. [2]
Q155 Mr Chaytor: What is social sustainability?
What is your understanding of that and how can that be measured
and built into a design brief?
Mr Kester: We were talking earlier
about the benefit to the wider community and that would be a very
good example. If a school is actually going to integrate effectively
into its community, maybe it is going to be a sustainable school,
is a school which does not shut its doors at 3.30 but is making
the best use of that building and maximising the opportunities
pretty much around the clock, providing as many opportunities
for the ageing population that we have in the UK, which we know
is only going to expand, how is a school going to respond to those
issues and could they be great places for that? We have an increasing
chronic disease issue in the UK. What about health? Are they going
to be a great space to do work-outs and healthy living? What sort
of social benefits is the school going to provide?
Q156 Mr Chaytor: The logic of your
argument therefore is that all schools under the BSF programme
should be what the Government now calls extended schools.
Mr Kester: Yes; absolutely.
Q157 Mr Chaytor: So that is not the
way it works. Being an extended school is not necessarily a requirement
to attract BSF funding, is it? You are making an interesting point
that, if the Government are committed to social sustainability,
the school needs to have community links.
Mr Kester: I would come back to
the point that each school should have its own local vision. It
comes back to the point that was made earlier about whether the
designers are going to solve those problems. No. The designers
can only solve the problems if they are given the problems and
that means that one needs to define those problems and say what
you are seeking to achieve here. "For these situations, because
we have social exclusion as an issue here, we believe that our
school needs to provide really excellent opportunities for the
youth in this area to become more engaged and involved and these
are some of the possibilities and opportunities we are opening
up for this school and therefore, because we are offering these
sorts of services, this is the sort of brief that we should like
to provide to our designers". The designers will react and
provide the solutions to the problems that you give them.
Mr Sorrell: Just a quick point.
We just have to be cautious about generalisation here. If you
visit somewhere like the Jo Richardson School near Becton, a secondary
school, a very, very urban environment indeed, a very, very large
number of students in the school, it is an extended school, for
example they have a gym which the local community uses, it looks
like it is working very well indeed and very successful, very
integrated with the local community but it is a different kind
of physical environment to, let us say, a school down in St Just
in Cornwall that I know, where there would not be the demand for
that kind of extended environment for the community. It is again
another reason why it is just wrong to say you can take one-size-fits-all
and deliver it anywhere. It just does not work, because our schools
around the country in different places are very, very, very different
and what would be a school which delivers in a particular way
socially in the community in one place will have very different
needs in another, so you have to be quite careful.
Q158 Chairman: If design is so wonderful,
what stops good design being used? There is a community out there
with a view where educationalists will talk to designers and designers
will talk to construction companies. What stops you guys being
successful?
Ms Cottam: Two things: one is
that design, as we are talking about it, is not commonly understood.
Even this afternoon we have seen the difficulty of us trying the
convey to you what we understand as the design process versus
your understanding of design as being beautiful architecture,
which is important but only part of the whole process.
Q159 Chairman: No, we are worried
that that is what you think.
Ms Cottam: There has obviously
been a communication mismatch. For us design is an important problem-solving
process of which beautiful buildings are only one part. The second
thing is the process itself. Of course it costs money to get the
good design process, it costs time, there has to be a structured
process and you have to pay somebody to do it. Our argument would
be to make sure that that can be done up front, because you will
recoup the costs fast down the line as you go into the actual
building process. At the moment the structure is not set up to
enable that to happen. There are schools which know about it and
want it and they cannot get it and there are those which do not
know about it yet and need to be informed about it and it needs
to be afforded to them.
Mr Kester: I should say that there
are two big obstacles: one is an experience deficit which is the
point about first-time clients. In the end, take the best design
projects that you have around the world and they usually had fantastic
clients leading them. This is a really important issue which all
points to the fact that you need to have your good early design
processes, that you do not want design to start in that 13-week
period of procurement, you want design to start much, much earlier,
all about getting really design savvy and design able early on.
The other thing is the time, with particular reference here to
schools, the time-poor environment of a school, where there are
so many priorities on teachers and one is of course adding another
one when one is saying the pupils and they have to be involved
in a whole process here in defining what the future school is,
when on the other hand there are GCSEs, A levels, 101 other pressures.
What we have to do is forge the space to do this properly and
also, and there are some real lessons in the work of joinedupdesignforschools,
in making it fun too. If that process is enjoyable, that creative
process in defining your vision and engaging everybody, then people
just want to do it rather than be bullied into doing it.
Q160 Chairman: Is not John's whole
process of joinedupdesignforschools, which he knows I support
absolutely, a kind of a one-club effort in a sense? What I am
getting from you is that the crucial thing you have to have is
an informed client who knows that they want certain kinds of things
to happen in the building, flexibility, new IT options, all of
that, but you also want someone who knows what they want about
sustainability. They want to seriously take on the issues of the
carbon footprint and all that. You are liberating the student
to say that, but are you really liberating other people in the
school community, even the local authority and the teacher to
have a real impact on that?
Mr Sorrell: The Sorrell Foundation
joinedupdesignforschools programme focuses absolutely on pupils.
They are the ones who are most excluded and are the least likely
to be asked what they think. The whole client group is absolutely
vital and it is a complex client group. You do not always have
that many people involved as you do here, but it is a necessity,
that is the way it is. What is absolutely important is for the
client team to be a cohesive coherent unit and that includes head
teachers, teachers, parents, governors, the LA and the pupils.
If you can get the vision from them produced in a way that the
people who are going to design the school can understand, then
you have a conversation. You do not just do this in five minutes
or in a focus group, this takes time as we keep saying and the
conversation develops over a period of time and you will pretty
much always get a good result. I should just like to answer the
question about what stops good design, if I may. I am very pleased
you asked the question what stops good design, because the point
I made earlier was that design happens. Everything gets designed,
not necessarily by the right people. Decisions are not necessarily
made by people who really know how to make them and in this particular
case with schools we have a client group, that big stakeholder
group, who are not the world's leading experts on this subject.
They do need all the help that they can be given and we do need
to inform them so that they can be better clients. The thing that
really stops good design in the end is attitude. It is the attitude
that somehow or other design is a kind of add-on extra that you
do not really need. It is absolutely fundamental to the success
of the Building Schools for the Future programme and, if we can
design these schools right, then they will be successful.
Chairman: Thank you very much. We have
run out of time. That has been a really stimulating session. I
hope you will remain in contact with us. We need your help in
that we have only just started this inquiry. We want to know who
else we should see and call in to give evidence. We also need
to know what we should look at and if you can help in that process
or if there is anything you did not say to the Committee in this
session that you should have said, you know where to find us.
Thank you very much.
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