Supplementary memorandum submitted by
the Design Council
1. INTRODUCTION
The Design Council welcomes the opportunity
to respond to the House of Commons Select Committee's inquiry
into Sustainable Schools.
The Design Council has been working to explore
and explain the impact of effective design on learning environments
since 2001. The recommendations in this submission result from
this activity.
2. THE DESIGN
COUNCIL'S
WORK IN
SCHOOLS
Our work with a number of secondary schools
demonstrated that despite huge economic and social change and
the rapid evolution of educational practice, the environments
where learning takes place have remained largely unchanged from
those in use at the turn of the century.
Despite the efforts of teachers to adapt their
surroundings, the rigid classroom layouts, dingy, cramped corridors
and uncomfortable, poor quality furniture presented substantial
obstacles to successful learning. These problems were symptomatic
of a failure to involve users in the design process and of seeing
the physical environment in isolation from the broader educational
process.
The Design Council's programme was structured
to help schools create and test a way of defining the issues they
faced and finding solutions that could be implemented relatively
quickly and within existing budgets. The design process we evolved
looked beyond the classroom itself to consider the school as a
whole, including matters such as procurement, communication and
the organisation of the school day. Most importantly, the design
process required the participation of all the users of schools—teachers,
pupils, support staff, parents, and the community—in an
exploration of fundamental questions about what the schools stood
for and how they functioned before looking at how they could change.
The learning from this work has been distilled
into an online toolkit, designmyschool.com, which is described
fully in appendix 1.
3. CONTEXT—BUILDING
SCHOOLS FOR
THE FUTURE
The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme
is an unprecedented opportunity to bring learning environments
into the 21st century. It has the potential to enable important
new educational practice such as personalised learning, thereby
equipping young people with the skills they need, driving up attainment
levels.
However, the programme risks failing to produce
schools with the capacity to meet learning needs now and in the
future if it does not have at its heart an educational vision
articulated both at a national policy level and by each individual
school. Such a vision must take account of the skills which the
nation as a whole needs to develop in order to remain competitive
in a fast-changing global economy. It must allow for the needs
of individual communities and it must incorporate the needs of
individual learners.
We believe that schools must have the opportunity
to shape their own vision using a creative design process, which
explores and defines their needs and creates a solid basis for
the design and procurement of new buildings under BSF. It is equally
vital that the school's vision is protected throughout the BSF
process, so that it is fully reflected by the finished result.
In addition, BSF will benefit from being synchronised
with a range of other important policy initiatives with a direct
bearing on children's quality of life and education. These include
Every Child Matters, Extended Schools and the 2006 Schools
White Paper, as well as other areas of education policy such 14-19
provision.
If it is integrated with a co-ordinated policy
agenda based on an educational vision, BSF can be an educational
programme rather than being simply a capital building programme.
4. DEFINING DESIGN
Our recommendations are rooted in an approach
to design that goes beyond a narrow view of it as a craft-based,
primarily individual, activity confined to objects and aesthetics.
Rather, it reflects current practice by exploiting design as a
creative process for identifying and solving problems through
techniques that enable lateral thinking and the iterative prototyping
and testing of possible solutions. Moreover, it can be applied
not just to the form and function of products or the look and
feel of graphics, but to the development of strategy and process
and the creation of services.
The methodology we used in our work with schools
is based on the principle that the most effective design comes
from involving end-users in a consultative and inclusive process.
This kind of design practice is used successfully
across a diverse range of sectors in business. When Clarks Shoes
decided to move into the growing market for outdoor activity footwear
it carried out ethnographic research with customers that fed through
to the design specification of its new Active Mover range. Nokia
anticipates trends by working closely with phone users and Stannah
Stairlifts preceded a substantial overhaul of its products by
working with both their users and with the carers and relatives
who might participate in their choice and commissioning.
There is ample evidence more generally that
the use of design at a strategic level has marked benefits for
businesses. The share prices of design-led businesses listed on
the Stock Exchange out-performed the key FTSE indices by 200%
over a 10-year period. Meanwhile, businesses which regard design
as integral to their operations report positive impact across
practically every measure of performance, including market share,
sales, profits and competitiveness.
Failure to transfer user-centred, strategic
design principles to BSF will bring with it the risk that we produce
buildings which are efficiently procured and outwardly impressive
but which do not meet today's learning needs or have the flexibility
to meet tomorrow's.
5. ISSUES AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
Our recommendations relate directly to these
issues:
— BSF governance and process.
5.1 Role of Design
Recommendation: Use design process to engage stakeholders
to create their vision at least 12 months ahead of formal procurement
and well before the BSF Wave begins in their area.
A significant body of work, supported by DfES,
has developed design thinking applied to learning environments.
This work, by the Design Council and other organisations including
CABE, School Works and the Sorrell Foundation, was conceived and
developed to investigate new ways of designing and procuring flexible
learning environments that can contribute directly to better educational
attainment. Chiefly, these initiatives attempted to make users
central to creating environments capable of meeting their needs
now and into the future.
International examples provide a glimpse of
the results such an approach could yield. In San Diego, an ex-Navy
warehouse has become a school designed around the principles of
modern office environments. There are classrooms, but also flexible
spaces for group interaction. Children spend half their time in
classes and the other half on self-directed projects with one-to-one
support. Highly motivated by this environment, they typically
arrive up to 45 minutes early for school.
At Valby school in Copenhagen, pupils are co-creators
rather than passive consumers of their learning experience. They
even source, prepare and sell their own food as part of a strategy
to foster self-reliance as well as entrepreneurial and inter-personal
skills.
Moving towards schools like this means placing
their users—teachers, pupils, parents, adult learners—at
the heart of a creative design process, giving them the lead role
in discovering and meeting their own needs.
The Design Council worked with 12 secondary
schools to embed such a process, involving teachers, support staff,
governors, parents and pupils. Each school took part in two days
of workshops, run by a design-skilled facilitator provided by
the Design Council. This included a series of exercises to encourage
participants to think about their school in new ways through techniques
such as brainstorming. Participants worked together to create
a vision statement for the school and identify barriers to realising
it. Later, emphasis shifted to bringing the vision to life and
identifying broad themes and objectives. The workshops culminated
in a vote on which issues to pursue. Generally, the Design Council
led on one of the resulting projects, while the school managed
others itself.
These sessions often delivered unexpected insights.
At Alder Grange School in Lancashire, a discussion focusing on
pupils' concentration revealed that they weren't drinking enough
water, despite the school's attempts to persuade them to do so.
The reason turned out to be that the toilets were so unpleasant
that, to avoid using them, pupils preferred to go without water.
The design process also led to a solution. The school had been
committed to building a new technology block with money provided
to help it adapt to its new technology college status. Instead,
it converted a set of gym changing rooms into the technology centre
and used the remaining money to create a new toilet block.
The Deputy Headteacher of Alder Grange, David
Hampson, said: "This is something we would never have thought
of ourselves". Commenting on the value of the project as
a whole, Hampson added: "Probably the main benefit was the
design process. It's opened the eyes of staff who work here and
encouraged them to realise that they work in an environment they
can control and have an impact on." He also says the design
process has fostered ideas that will be fed in to the BSF process,
which will remodel Alder Grange.
Significantly, Hampson and Alder Grange Head
teacher Ian Hulland are so enthusiastic about the design process
that they have taken it to seven local schools which are to be
reconfigured and rationalised as part of BSF. Hampson says the
process provides a framework allowing teams to "pull problems
apart" and is especially valuable "when you've got a
problem and you've no idea what the solution is".
Elsewhere in Lancashire, Great Sankey High School
has embedded a design-led approach in all it does. Head teacher
Alan Yates said: "The process has helped us in several ways.
It's emphasised the importance of clearly defining what the Holy
Grail is before you start looking for it. We've also learnt a
way of involving the whole—school students, parents, everybody—and
getting ownership."
"We're changing our school day and our
curriculum as well. We couldn't have moved that quickly without
this process. We've adopted it and internalised it—but these
techniques are applicable anywhere."
These experiences demonstrate the centrality
of a design process in helping schools define the vision that
should underpin decisions with large-scale procurement implications.
This process increases school communities' understanding
of what is possible, enables them to play a fuller role in the
formal design process and helps to ensure that they are participants
in change rather than the object of change.
Recommendation: Use a design process to create a
Learning Principles document.
During the BSF process itself, an in-built design
mechanism will enable stakeholders and end-users systematically
to identify issues at key points.
Schools must be given the chance to challenge
and correct unexpected circumstances, and then define, create,
develop and deliver solutions. Engaging teachers, students, parents
and other stakeholders in a structured design process to clarify
and regularly refine and redefine the vision for their school
and what sorts of learning environments they need is crucial.
If this engagement is missing, there is a high risk that the desired
transformation will not be achieved.
DfES should require that a proportion of any
capital expenditure over £1 million be spent on facilitating
users' involvement, so they can participate in all stages of the
process. A small amount of spending here will help to achieve
better outcomes and protect the residual value of the new schools.
An early tangible outcome of this spend could
be the compilation of a Learning Principles document in which
all parties reach a consensus on their core values and agree their
modus operandi for the coming years.
Recommendation: Prototype concepts before, throughout
and after the build.
Opportunities must be created to share prototypes
of the components of new learning environments resulting from
BSF.
The knowledge and learning from such prototyping
exercises should be captured and made available to all to share,
adopt or modify to suit the delivery of their own local visions.
In a 2005 CABE/RIBA report, Professor Stephen
Heppell suggested it would be better to use 3.7% of the total
spend for prototyping components which can be configured to suit
any individual school, than incur the later and heavier cost of
fixing problems in a finished school that could have been avoided
earlier.
Prototyping activities will need to be funded
with research and development money. Therefore it will be necessary
to ring-fence a proportion of the total capital budget to cover
ongoing iteration and improvement once the building is in use
and there is measurable data about the performance of the new
learning environment.
5.2 BSF governance and process
Recommendation: Review the relationship between
the bodies implementing BSF and their respective powers.
To deliver the best outcomes, the BSF process
should bring together the stakeholders in a school project—planners,
architects, designers, users, community, policy makers—to
create and realise a shared educational vision. If it does not
do this, it is a highly complex process with the potential for
tension between competing interests, timelines and priorities.
Responsibility for all aspects of local education
rests with local authorities, which are also handed a mandate
as "strategic commissioners on an area-wide basis".
Yet operational control of BSF rests with Local Education Partnerships
(LEPs), which are tasked with ensuring that local authorities
deploy BSF funds efficiently and effectively. They act as the
single point of contact for procuring all services needed to deliver
the investment programme, they manage the sub-contractors and
enable project delivery through a mix of procurement routes.
A further potential complicating factor is the
relationship between LEPs and Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs),
the vehicle for including communities in the governance and development
of public services. Do they have distinctive, complementary or
conflicting roles? And what will be the impact of Local Area Agreements
(LAAs) between local authorities and LSPs on the priorities for
delivery of local services, including education? Could these partnerships
actually compete for the same resources?
Also, if the BSF process itself is taken to
the letter, it is possible that the people who use schools—teachers,
pupils, governors, support staff, the community—will be
unable to participate after development of the Outline Business
Case (Stage 2 in the BSF process). Two or three years could then
pass between the creation of the school's vision and its being
realised, without any involvement from the school during this
period.
There is a risk that the school's vision may
be lost or diluted during this period. This risk would be offset
by Design Advisors, usually a firm of architects, who protect
the initial vision through to the finished school. Appointed by
the LA and independent of the LEP, their roles include getting
the vision into the strategic business case, implementing Design
Quality Indicators, briefing LEPs, advising stakeholders on emerging
designs and monitoring design quality during construction.
Clarity is needed on how the respective interests
and responsibilities can be defined to create a collective, effective
strategy for educational transformation. Above all, the interests
of the users of schools must be safeguarded throughout the BSF
process.
5.3 Sharing best practice
Recommendation: Share best practice by developing
Learning Environment Incubators.
It will be necessary to create and resource
a mechanism for schools to share design insights and ideas. Currently,
hard-won learning about effective school design, including ways
to integrate school organisation with new design processes, is
held only by single institutions and is thus effectively lost
to the wider BSF programme.
The knowledge and learning from prototyping
exercises must be captured and made available for all to share,
adopt or modify to suit the delivery of their own local visions.
In addition, any other school should have the
opportunity to "incubate" and nurture a new idea that
its stakeholders believe will bring a solution to a local issue.
This would tackle the very real issue of "experience deficit"—very
few if any BSF participants will have direct experience of being
a client in a major capital project.
Appendix 1
designmyschool.com
designmyschool.com is a password-protected website
that provides a toolkit to enable school communities better to
understand their needs and gauge opinion. The website began as
an online metric centred on an interactive questionnaire.
It is simultaneously a knowledge management
resource, a reference point for schools and pupils, and a tool
for discovering what people actually think about their school
environments. Even as a prototype on limited release, 300 organisations
representing 1,000 schools have expressed an interest in using
designmyschool.
At present the site is aimed at secondary schools,
but it could be developed to encompass primary schools and provide
resources for specific user groups such as parents and school
governors. Ultimately, it could become a web-based portal for
all school stakeholders as well as architects, contractors and
other strategic bodies.
The site contains bright, informal and easy
to understand explanations of the design process, case studies
and video explanations, message boards and questionnaires. It
presents users with simple questions which schools often find
it difficult to ask themselves.
The seven broad areas of inquiry are:
Each area is analysed by asking participants
six to eight questions. The Lunchtime theme, for example, is broken
down into the following questions:
— Have you ever been bullied during
lunchtime?
— Do you often skip eating at lunch
to do other activities during this period?
— Do you look forward to lunchtime?
— Do you think lunchtime is at the
right time during the day?
— Do you think lunchtime is for the
right length of time?
— Are you able to get everything you
want to done during this period?
After completing the survey, participants can
review their answers and see how their responses compare with
those of the rest of their year group and their entire school.
Also, results can be compared with all other participating schools.
A good deal of the site, however, is dedicated to explanations
of the design process, the idea of co-design and instructions
on how to use tools such as brainstorming, speed dating and prototyping.
DfES is exploring with the Design Council how
to promote wider use of and development of the site. This would
ensure that designmyschool.com and the learning from the broader
Design Council work could be integrated with the BSF programme.
Comments from users:
"Designmyschool is going to be used as one
of the cornerstones of the Lancashire strategy. We are planning
to use the site as a vehicle to engage and involve all of our
students in the decision-making process as part of the Every
Child Matters agenda. "
Ged Mitchell, Manchester LA
"We are running a design programme with
10 schools and plan to incorporate designmyschool into the programme
of design activities. "
Sue Mulvenny, Director Lancashire LA
"We are a pilot BSF school for Sheffield
and would like to use designmyschool to involve pupils in designing
all areas of the school and to look at best practice in other
schools. "
Ray Fellows, Barnsley Design Centre
October 2006
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