Examination of Witnesses (Questions 161-179)
MR TY
GODDARD AND
MR RICHARD
SIMMONS
3 JULY 2006
Chairman: May I welcome Richard Simmons
and Ty Goddard to our deliberations? I am sorry you are getting
a bit squeezed but there were more of them and they had first
innings. There is going to be some emphasis on sharp questioning
and succinct answers. Let us get through as much as we can and
Stephen is going to lead us.
Q161 Stephen Williams: With sharp questioning,
Chairman. May I start with Mr Goddard? In your written submission
to the Committee you have expressed a worry that local authorities
see people's involvement in consultation as a luxury rather than
an essential part of this particular programme. What sort of consultation
do you think local authorities should actually undertake? Can
you give us some good examples of where local authorities have
come up with some best practice that others could follow and where
authorities perhaps have not been so good?
Mr Goddard: School Works is concerned
with just that, the participation of stakeholders. We are different
from joinedupdesignforschools in the sense that we put an emphasis
on the full complex range of stakeholders both within the school
and outside the school. A best practice example would be work
with Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council. They have been particularly
impressive in not paying lip service to young people's views.
What they have actually done is mainstreamed young people's views,
stakeholder views both within their business case for Building
Schools for the Future, but also in the scoring process. A lot
of what you were talking about earlier, about how important design
is, is in reality how important a score it is actually given when
you come to evaluate all of the different bids that you get for
particular jobs in particular local areas? My worry about consultation
is that it is very patchy at the moment. It depends on how a local
authority feels about it. The general pre-conceived incorrect
view is that stakeholder engagement is complicated, it raises
people's expectations and it takes lots and lots of time and money.
In fact what you heard today was an exposition about why it makes
educational sense to have young people and others, all of the
stakeholders, because where is transformation going to come from?
What does transformation mean in this case? I have some difficulties
in interpreting it myself because I hear lots of transformatory
visions all around the country and there is no common language.
The problem that we have, and it is one of the biggest challenges
and that is where our expertise is, is that the involvement of
stakeholders in Building Schools for the Future is not uniform.
It is patchy and it is not accorded enough actual exposition throughout
the process. For us it also makes good business sense. You mentioned
contractors earlier and the progressive contractors and others
have for a long time seen the benefits of proper stakeholder engagement
in terms of being able to prioritise their spend on particular
buildings. There is no point actually prioritising a spend on
something people do not want or which can become redundant in
the future. So those are my worries: patchy, not uniform, little
bits of good practice and the immediate one I quote is Knowsley
who need to be congratulated. Other authorities have tried to
do it, but they have met a number of challenges.
Mr Simmons: Firstly you have to
understand who the client is around here and we do a lot of work
through our enabling programme People Procuring Schools and principally
that is with local authorities. There are some good examples of
head teachers and teachers being involved. I should cite the Jo
Richardson School in Barking as a good example where the head
had a clear vision for pedagogy. We might come back to some of
the issues around flexible design later on, but certainly he had
a view about how he wanted teaching to happen and that is not
really as common as it should be at the moment. If you are talking
about PFI, then of course you have the relationship with the contractor
and with local education partnerships which are developing now,
you may well have a situation where there is an exemplar school
where a contractor is picked and then the process by which we
get down to individual school designs is still unclear. There
is one other thing I should like to mention which is that the
Office of Government Commerce, as you may know, produces guidance
on design in procurement. There is a series of gateways, as the
OGC calls them, which you have to go through for design. One of
those is called post-occupancy evaluation. So we are not just
talking about involving pupils, teachers and head teachers at
the point of purchase, we also want to learn from what has happened.
At the moment post-occupancy evaluation is a scarce commodity
and we are certainly arguing very strongly, and the OGC have just
acknowledged this, that you have to go back to find out from people
what has worked and what has not worked so you can learn for future
programmes.
Q162 Stephen Williams: Just to follow
up on what you said about post-occupancy evaluation, are you confident
that there is enough flexibility in the designs of schools for
you to be able to amend the design? If a pupil comes forward and
says "We are being bullied in this corridor that leads around
a corner and want to get rid of it" can you actually alter
the design thereafter?
Mr Simmons: That will depend on
the design of the school you are talking about. The point about
flexibility is an interesting one. We should certainly argue that
one way to achieve that is by increasing the amount of space available
for classrooms and flexible areas for personal learning, for example.
If you were to design a completely flexible interior environment,
you still have the problem of what happens when you come to refurbish
or change that school but, as you probably know, because we have
tabled it as evidence, we have just conducted a survey of 52 of
the 124 secondary schools built in the last five years, which
CABE has done as part of its normal work, and we are pleased to
say it arrived just at the point when this Committee was meeting.
We are not confident at all that those kinds of issues of flexibility
are being taken on board in a very large number of schools.
Q163 Stephen Williams: Mr Goddard
mentioned Knowsley as a good LA example of consultation. Mr Simmons
mentioned Barking School as a good example. Who should be the
driver on consultation? Is it the school, the head and the governors,
is it the LA or is it the contractors who are doing the building
work?
Mr Goddard: Part of the issue
is exactly what Richard said that there is sometimes a real difficulty
about assessing who the client is. Sometimes, for instance, local
authorities might actually feel that they are the client more
than an individual school and perhaps sometimes an individual
school will feel they are more of a client than a local authority.
In a sense, the two examples, what you have in Jo Richardson in
Barking and Dagenham LA is a supportive local authority which
was prepared to look at pedagogy, teaching and learning, in a
different way. Then it went through a process of early consultation
and actually used a firm of architects to enable that early consultation
work to take place. The actual school was then built by a completely
different firm of architects using a lot of the findings from
that early firm. So clearly Barking and Dagenham owned that, but
clearly the constructor and a pioneering head teacher also owned
that. You heard earlier about the complex set of relationships.
This is a complex business and to get everybody speaking a common
language is the actual challenge.
Q164 Chairman: How did it work in
Knowsley? As I understand it, Knowsley actually decided to build
the same school on eight locations. It was a sort of Tesco solution,
so not much discussion with the other seven even if they did it
in one.
Mr Goddard: Knowsley are in a
Building Schools for the Future wave. What they decided was that
with the scale of transformation that they wanted to see and the
need within their local area, they were very, very serious about
actually having proper stakeholder groups but also skilled stakeholders.
What actually happened was that you got 150-odd people who represented
a number of the interests in that particular locality and they
themselves were the drivers of transformation.
Q165 Chairman: They said they all
wanted the same school?
Mr Goddard: In a sense no; not
that they all wanted the same school. What they wanted were common
outcomes.
Q166 Chairman: What is the difference
between that and wanting the same school?
Mr Goddard: In the sense that
it is too early to say that they have got the same school, the
bidding process is still underway, it is down to a short list,
there are three supply chains at the moment, so we actually do
not yet know the result of the Knowsley process and it would be
too early to generalise. What is interesting is that they are
not having a LEP, they are not having a Local Education Partnership;
they have come up with their own scoring matrix and they have
empowered people profoundly in the sense of taking people on school
visits not only in the UK but outside of the UK. Absolutely key
is the briefing process but also how good your client is. Is that
client able to be the perfect magpie and take some of the attributes
of Danish schools for instance and make them fit what Knowsley
wants to do? Are they able to take ideas from the Jo Richardson
Community School and inhabit them in Knowsley?
Q167 Stephen Williams: We were talking
about the complexity of the client groups involved. Does the consultation
need to be broken down, for instance on ICT or facilities management?
Should the consultation be done by the specialists or the providers
in that field and consultation with certain people?
Mr Goddard: What I know from one
of the examples we are talking about at the moment is that subject
heads were empowered quite considerably in the Jo Richardson school
to think about what they needed in their particular subject area.
Yes, in a sense you have to have some quite profound generalised
stakeholder engagement, but then, as you have suggested, you do
need to drill down in terms of particular subject areas.
Mr Simmons: I agree. We keep talking
about Jo Richardson and there are other examples: St Francis of
Assisi in Liverpool, which is the school that set environmental
sustainability as part of its core curriculum. It is an Academy,
so it is part of its specialist subject. They have tried to approach
the issues differently from Jo Richardson and they have had the
opportunity of being an Academy to try to be more specific about
what they want to achieve. For example, their whole building reflects
the ethos; it has green roofs and so on. It is important that
people understand the ethos that the school is trying to create.
There are clearly areas where standards and standardisation are
useful because they save money. Things like toilet design: we
do not need to go on re-inventing toilets, we know the kinds of
toilets that work for schools and prevent bullying. We know that
broad corridors with natural daylight in them are far better and
again reduce bullying, although sadly they are not being built
as much as we should like to see. We know that outside the school,
a good variety of spaces, some hard, some soft, some places where
you can go to sit down and so on, are valuable but there are also
things which make a school right for its locality. Jo Richardson,
for example, is right for its locality because it is a community
school and there is a very clear demarcation line between the
school and the community facilities there, for example they share
a library. Those kinds of issues will only really emerge from
very local engagement and, as you say, looking at those specialist
areas and making sure they are fit for purpose.
Q168 Stephen Williams: Can we go
on to participation by pupils and other groups? Do you think that
an obligation should be placed on each new school that they actually
set up a pupil/client group? As I understand it, that is not necessarily
the case at the moment.
Mr Simmons: It is certainly not
the case at the moment. I should like to start with teachers because
teachers have not been talked about quite so much by the Committee
so far.
Q169 Chairman: I tried, but John
Sorrell knocked me back.
Mr Simmons: Involving pupils is
obviously an important thing to do but teachers and head teachers
in particular are very important. I also agree with what the Committee
was saying about the fact that nobody can quite foresee what education
will be like in 10, 15, 20 years' time. You have to think about
flexibility and this is a tough challenge for teachers. What our
enablers, the people who go out and advise clients, are finding
at the moment and reporting back in our survey is that very often
people are so glad to have a new non-leaking school and they have
invested so much of their time and energy in it that they have
not necessarily focused on how teaching and pedagogy might change
or how they might use the new school to transform the curriculum.
We have put in for you some evidence which the Scots have gathered—I
hope it is okay to mention the Scottish Executive in this company.
They have been looking very hard at setting standards for environmental
sustainability and have been off and looked at good practice in
Sweden and Germany. From that, they have looked at the whole way
in which schools are designed, from the point of view of sustainability,
starting with the people who will use them, starting with how
the young people will be engaged and looking at how, for example,
young people will go on monitoring how a school works into the
future. If you are a pupil five years into a new school, you will
not necessarily be involved in its design, but what you can be
involved in is simple monitoring systems which allow you to work
out how much energy it is using and how you might improve on that
in the future. There are ways of actually involving people through
the whole life of the school and into the curriculum which are
being tried in continental Europe and which we could learn from.
Q170 Stephen Williams: If you think
teachers should be involved and perhaps pupils, do you think there
should be an obligation to involve pupils? That was the question
I asked.
Mr Simmons: Yes. The way that
the procurement processes work at the moment is becoming more
complex because there is more plurality available moving away
from just using PFI. In PFI projects the whole pace at which you
have to work and the way in which the design process works mean
it is quite hard to achieve that kind of engagement and often
it is not clear who the client is. To answer your question, there
certainly should be pupil engagement but it would be very demanding
to ask for that immediately, without a fairly significant change
in the procurement process, so it may be a journey we have to
go on to achieve it.
Q171 Stephen Williams: So are you
saying the current procurement does not allow adequate time for
pupil involvement?
Mr Simmons: It does not allow
for time and quite often the client, if it is a local authority,
are not necessarily in the best position to involve pupils because
the best people to do that are the parents, teachers and governors
of the school. Ty has obviously greater expertise than I in this,
but that would be our analysis.
Q172 Stephen Williams: You mentioned
pupils, teachers, head teachers, governors and other people involved
in schools. What about dinner ladies and cleaners? Is there a
role for them in the design of the kitchens and the dining hall
and corridors they have to clean?
Mr Simmons: We are certainly interested
in some of the best housing schemes we have looked at procured
by social housing landlords who have involved the management team
in the design process, as well as the people who actually have
to run the housing side of things. The results of that have been
places that are much more pleasant to live in. I should say the
same principle would apply here.
Q173 Stephen Williams: I suppose
neighbours of the school would be another example, but they might
be covered by the planning process, so I guess they would be consulted
at a later stage. Do you think it would better if they were consulted
early on before we get to a formal planning application?
Mr Simmons: There are certainly
some interesting examples of schools which have been developed
where, because the people who have developed the school have taken
notice of what the neighbours have had to say about, for example
what happens at lunchtime, they have provided different lunchtime
arrangements. So if they provided cafeteria-type arrangements
with a broader menu, they found fewer kids out on the streets
at lunchtime and quite often getting over that first issue of
the impact of being a neighbour of a school starts a dialogue
that can go on, so there are certainly benefits in doing that.
It does have to be a manageable process of course and the first
point we should always make is that plan and procurement by a
well-informed client is the best way forward. If you are going
to engage communities, you have to plan that into the timetable.
Q174 Stephen Williams: May I ask
a couple of questions on procurement to Mr Goddard? School Works
suggest in their written evidence to us that the current bidding
process creates some unnecessary duplication in terms of contractors'
discussions with schools on designs. Is the bidding process not
essential to make sure you get the best contractor to come forward
with the best design?
Mr Goddard: It was a worry that
we wanted to share with you about our work. We have been involved
in one of the early Building Schools for the Future project waves
in Bradford and we had three individual supply chains and they
were all talking to the schools involved in Bradford. I felt that
there was a way that we could mutualise the approach. For instance,
on Tuesday evening supply chain A was talking to that particular
school and on Wednesday evening supply chain B and Thursday evening
supply chain C.
Q175 Chairman: Could you call a spade
a spade? What does "supply chain" mean?
Mr Goddard: I am sorry. I should
love to call a spade a spade if it were called a spade. The supply
chain is the people bidding to build schools.
Q176 Chairman: Can we have it in
English? The great general public are going to read this Report
and it is gobbledegook. Tell us, who the people are in there and
which companies they represent.
Mr Goddard: I almost have to supply
my own glossary of terms because that is not my own language.
Those are various construction firms and their suppliers who have
come together to bid to build a local authority's particular school
under Building Schools for the Future, commonly known out there,
and I agree it is not a word I would use in my local either, as
supply chains. All the people who wanted to win the job in Bradford
had got onto a short list.
Q177 Chairman: We understand the
concept; it is just that other people have to understand it.
Mr Goddard: Good point; I apologise.
In a sense though, the point still is that there was no single
conversation with schools. I felt that the capacity—and
we heard this earlier when somebody talked about "time poor"
within schools—and the nature of what it takes to run and
manage a school had not actually been fully appreciated. What
I thought was worthy of comment and investigation was whether
we could actually have a process that was mutual around stakeholder
engagement at the shortlist stage.
Q178 Chairman: Are you saying that
the consultation process is not thorough enough and does not reach
far enough, but the bidding process is long drawn out and does
not respond or tie up to the consultation?
Mr Goddard: What I am saying is
that the participation with stakeholders, both under Building
Schools for the Future and all sorts of other capital streams
is patchy at the moment and at times the frenzied 12- or 13-week
process does not actually help to get views of stakeholders early
enough and in fact could actually make it worse. What happens
is that you duplicate processes of finding out what clients, what
teachers, what pupils actually want.
Q179 Stephen Williams: How well do
you think that the Local Education Partnership model is working
in providing good schools?
Mr Goddard: What I hear is people
who talk about—this is another glossary term you might need—fat
LEPs, thin LEPs, all sorts of different shaped LEPs. From what
I perceive when I travel around the country there is not universal
acclamation for the concept of local education partnerships. Partly
this is quite a complex process of different investors having
different percentages, but also it has led to certain fears within
local authorities about what the actual functions of those LEPs
are. I understand that CABE's recent research that was published
today also has findings on LEPs.
Mr Simmons: It is a bit early
to say what LEPs will produce because none of them has built anything
yet. What we have done is look at schools that have been built
over the last five years and found that about half of them do
not measure up; they are poor or mediocre against the design quality
indicators which the DfES and ourselves use. So it is a relatively
objective measure and this is not about icons, by the way: this
is about whether there is natural daylight in classrooms and whether
the corridors are wide enough and some of those basic things.
We should like to see more beautiful buildings, but we should
also like to see buildings that function well first and foremost.
Not all local authorities are choosing LEPs of course, because
they have a choice ranging from traditional procurement through
to LEPs. What we are seeing at the moment in the early engagement
we have with Building Schools for the Future generally is that
there are some very good schemes out there actually, but there
are quite a lot that our enablers, who are the people who have
direct involvement—an enabler is an architect or a designer
who works to advise a client for the first 10 to 15 weeks of a
project in getting the best possible deal in terms of design and
so on—are not seeing sufficient evidence that there really
is good design. May I just pick up a point that you made earlier
on? You said that the procurement process will produce good design
if there is competition between three firms. I think that was
implicit in what you said. Actually that is not the case and it
certainly was not the case in PFI projects because it is possible
to be selected for a PFI scheme if you have a good finance package
and good maintenance and management package, but you do not have
good design. We have put in some pictures. This is a PFI school
which was value engineered and which has no external landscaping
apart from tarmac and grass. That was value engineered out of
the project after the contract had been accepted.
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