Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
MR TY
GODDARD AND
MR RICHARD
SIMMONS
3 JULY 2006
Q180 Chairman: Where is this?
Mr Simmons: My team has not told
me because these are not name-and-shame-type photographs.
Q181 Chairman: Is it not about time
we started naming and shaming some of the people who build some
of this awful stuff?
Mr Simmons: What we are trying
to do is give you examples of good practice, but we also have
to look at what has not worked.
Q182 Chairman: This Committee gets
around a bit. We have seen in some of the places you expect to
see wonderful practice some awful schools in Scandinavia; we have
seen a terrible school, one of the worst I have ever seen, in
the Republic of Ireland; we have seen a wonderful school in my
time in Belfast.
Mr Simmons: Perhaps we may suggest
to the Committee a range of schools they might go to see which
illustrates various examples.
Q183 Chairman: What are we doing
to stop the very process of the last five years, new schools being
built, narrow corridors and no natural daylight? How can we stop
this?
Mr Simmons: We believe that more
support is being given to clients now. More people are assisting
clients at the start of the process, but one of the most effective
things we do is something called design review where we actually
get experts, architects and so on, to provide peer review for
the schemes. We think that there should be a lot more of that.
We also think that Partnerships for Schools and the DfES should
increase the weighting for good design that is provided when LEPs
are selected. We also think there needs to be quite a lot of vigilance.
It looks as though quite a lot of Local Education Partnerships
make a selection based on some exemplar schemes and of course
they will then be getting detailed design project by project and
there needs to be vigilance throughout the process to make sure
that we do not see the kind of value engineering—in the
jargon. Value engineering is when you start to cut the cost of
a project.
Q184 Chairman: Value engineering
is a wonderful term. So you end up with a school surrounded by
tarmac.
Mr Simmons: Yes. It depends how
you see value. There is some research from the States, from California,
to show that if you have good natural daylight in the classroom,
people will learn faster, they will learn maths 20% faster and
languages 26% faster and this is fairly well peer-reviewed research.
Q185 Chairman: Richard, I did not
need a survey from California to suggest that natural daylight
was good for education.
Mr Simmons: One of your colleagues
was asking for the background research to all this, so we do have
that available.
Q186 Helen Jones: I am interested
in this survey that you have conducted. I wonder whether you could
enlighten us as to where CABE put in support, what kind of support
you put into schools and how that fed through into improvements
in your view?
Mr Simmons: We tried to tailor
the support we provide depending on the needs of the client. Basically
what we do is provide 10-15 days of free time from an architect
or other designer who will advise the client about getting a good
procurement process going. It is about how to select the best
architect's designs but particularly how to get the brief as right
as you can. The brief is the document you try to produce at the
outset of the project to explain what it is you want. We found
in the survey that where people have been clear about what they
want, they quite often get it. The problem arises when people
are perhaps less clear about what they want. Where the DfES, for
example, have specified things like classroom sizes, you get that
size of classroom. If you want something bigger, and Jo Richardson
did, they had to provide extra funding from the single regeneration
budget to get larger classrooms. They had one of our enablers
working with them and they said that they wanted to teach the
kids differently here, they wanted to sit them in a horseshoe
rather like you are sitting and they wanted to have the teacher
at the front of the class and they wanted to have things like
the visualiser, which is a piece of hi-tech kit you use these
days instead of an overhead projector, at the front and they wanted
the kids all to be sitting where the teacher could see them, they
could see the teacher and they could focus on the lessons. That
is what they have done and that is really the kind of thing that
our enablers assisted them with. They have helped them to work
out how they could actually achieve that in the procurement process.
Q187 Helen Jones: I understand that,
but I am presuming, maybe wrongly, that you do not have the resources
to do that for every school so how can we replicate the lessons
that have been learned there into the whole Building Schools for
the Future programme?
Mr Simmons: Time permitting, we
have made quite a lot of recommendations here. It is certainly
possible, and in fact we have been talking to DfES and Partnership
for Schools quite positively about this, to get a better review
process going on so that the majority of schemes can be looked
at at the right stage in the process. The key stages are the point
when you have three bidders and you want to assess whether they
are all going to produce good designs or not; then further into
the process at the point when you are getting down to the design
that will actually get built, those are the kind of key processes
or key times. That is certainly achievable. If you think about
the scale of this programme and the fairly modest resource it
would require just to make those simple checks, it is not a huge
percentage. I cannot tell you what the percentage is, although
we can come back to you about that, but it is not a huge percentage
of the cost of the programme to put in place the kinds of checks
that will certainly reduce the risk and there are always going
to be risks, there will always be some schools that slip through
the net for one reason or another. However, we know enough now
about the basic functional design of schools to deal with some
of those issues. I do agree with the Committee that there is a
challenge to say "How do we make sure the schools will be
still fit for purpose 15-20 years down the track and how do we
achieve flexible design and perhaps more research is needed on
that. We do also know that schools like St Francis of Assisi have
looked at that and decided that they want to provide some flexible
spaces that can be used differently in different ways in the future.
That is not rocket science: good schools have always done that
in fact.
Q188 Helen Jones: That is fine, but
you say you have to be clear about what you want. Earlier we heard
a lot about Knowsley. Knowsley was actually reducing its number
of secondary schools as well and in a number of authorities, my
own included at the moment in a way which I heartedly disapprove
of, dealing with falling rolls is getting mixed up with Building
Schools for the Future. How in that case can you get the client
group to focus on how they transform educational opportunities
and use the building programme to do that when you actually have,
you are going to have by the nature of things, people who are
disaffected from the beginning if their school is closing. Do
you have any experience to offer us on that?
Mr Goddard: No, not specifically
from the School Works experience. My own personal experience in
Lambeth was having to deal with massive numbers of surplus places.
It is very, very difficult whilst you are trying to rebuild facilities
that are going to be flexible and fit for a 21st century and beyond
curriculum to deal with some of the structural issues within an
education authority. There is a tension; you are absolutely right.
Q189 Helen Jones: I was not just
pointing to tension. If the whole point about getting good design
depends on getting engaged with your client group, how do you
do that when two schools may be merging into one, when you have
people who are already disaffected from the process? How has that
been managed?
Mr Goddard: I am not here to tell
you that the participation of stakeholders is a magic wand, is
a complete panacea. What I do see, and it is around the word "ownership",
is that people, local population, local residents can own very,
very challenging questions themselves. What is happening in that
particular area of Knowsley is an attempt to skill people up,
give them a knowledge base with which to work with various professionals
who all, by the way, probably speak their own tribal language
in terms of these issues. It is not top-down, it is about actually
saying to that local community or communities "We are facing
these issues as an area, as an administrative area, please come
and help us sort these out".
Mr Simmons: I shall have to speak
from my previous experience as a local authority director which
is that you have to deal with the conflict first, you are right;
huge conflict arises when there are proposals for school mergers
and rationalisations and reductions. This really applies to community
engagement in a number of sectors and the first thing is to be
honest with people and to have a proper discussion about the facts
of the situation. In schools, the other thing I have seen work
well is when you actually focus on the young people and their
education. It is very easy to become entangled in the histories
of schools and so on, but if you think about the future of the
young people and how they are going to get the best out of a new
situation, then that is always a strong focus, it draws people
together. We talked about how complex it is to identify the client.
Very often the local authority is standing in loco head
teacher in these kinds of situations because the head may not
have been appointed and it is not easy. The way the Building Schools
for the Future programme works of course does quite often drive
you down the route. There are several places where this is going
on and this may be an area where we need to look further at where
there are examples of good practice that we can draw on.
Q190 Helen Jones: Can you identify
for us any problems which are affecting the first wave of the
BSF schools and are there lessons that we can learn for the future?
Mr Simmons: Because there are
not actually any open in the first wave yet, there are some pathfinders
coming on in spring—
Chairman: Roll that back. You have some
of these awful schools which have been built over the last five
years and Helen is asking you what we can learn from them?
Q191 Helen Jones: Before starting
on the pathfinders we want to know what lessons we can learn before
this massive amount of money is irrevocably committed to things
which may not be fit for purpose in the future.
Mr Simmons: I can give you some
specifics. If I may talk about the kind of schools that have been
built over the last five years which were built under PFI, a small
number of pathfinders and some Academies—and we looked at
52 of 124, so it was a sample survey—I can give you some
specific examples from individual schools, which is probably rather
easier than talking about the statistical survey. The school had
to adopt a one-way system because the corridors had been designed
to be too narrow because of value engineering, if I may use the
term now we have an understanding of what it means. Another school
had an atrium, a large glazed area at the centre of the school,
where the ventilation to keep that atrium cool was actually fed
into the neighbouring classrooms which meant that the noise passed
from the atrium into the classrooms. Another atrium which had
a glazed roof had no, there is a jargon term, I shall not use
it, Venetian-blind-type things to keep the sun out which therefore
overheats and there is not adequate ventilation. We are talking
about the school I mentioned earlier where there is no landscaping
apart from tarmac and some grass for the playing field and a school
where they created an egg-shaped layout. There is some good guidance
actually which DfES provides about layout of schools and there
are some good models for layouts of schools. The idea of the street
in a secondary school with areas off, halls, classrooms et cetera.
This one was egg shaped with the hall in the middle, so that when
people came to do exams in the hall in the middle they had the
noise of the school passing around them all day. A school with
L-shaped classrooms where the teachers had not been consulted
about the pedagogy, the teaching methods they wanted to follow
and they did not really want L-shaped classrooms but the supplier
had supplied L-shaped classrooms based on a Canadian model. Those
are some of the issues.
Q192 Chairman: These are very depressing
examples.
Mr Simmons: There are some good
examples. I was about to come on to those.
Q193 Chairman: I know you have good
examples but what we try to do in this Committee and the point
of this inquiry is to stop what has been going on and stop it
before the BSF rolls out. This is very, very recent history; this
is not what happened in the 1960s, it is what has happened in
the last five years.
Mr Simmons: Yes, this is very
recent.
Q194 Chairman: What we really want
to get out of this evidence session is how we can stop it happening
and that was the push of Helen's question to you.
Mr Simmons: To give you some idea
of what has not worked. There are some schools where things are
the opposite, where things have worked very well, like Bedminster
down in Bristol where the attendance of pupils has risen because
the school is attractive and well laid out. We have provided you
with quite a lot of material showing examples from all over Europe
which work well. So going on to our process—
Helen Jones: Why? Why does one
work and the other not? That is what we are trying to find out.
What makes things go pear-shaped in the way that you have described?
Q195 Chairman: We are politicians.
We like to track down who did it. In other words, are there terrible
builders out there who should never have been allowed to build
another school? Are there rotten architects/designers out there
who should never have been able to tender for a school again and
so on? What went wrong? If you talk to other people—and
I have to say that it is my whole life experience—you talk
to an architect and you say "There is that awful building,
what happened?" and it is never the designers or the architects,
it is somebody else guv. How do we track down whose fault or what
combination of faults went on in those bad examples and then eradicate
them?
Mr Simmons: We have heard from
Ty and it is complicated, but there are some key things we can
do to improve matters. The first is the point about initial preparation,
being clear about your brief and what it is you want and then
sticking to your guns. Being confident as a client is important
and you hit the nail on the head earlier on when you made the
point about strong effective clients. I agree with David Kester,
if you are a client for Building Schools for the Future programme,
you have probably not been a client for some time because there
has not been this scale of building before and you need support
and help in that process. Partnerships for Schools and DfES are
working on providing that at the moment and it is also fair to
say that in our survey in 2005 we did see a fairly significant
improvement in school design so the message is getting through
to some extent. Evaluating the bids is important. It is actually
really important that in the evaluation process design is not
sidelined or people do not think it is about icons or about having
signature architects. It is certainly important to have good architects
and establishing you have a good project team with good, experienced
architects who have built large projects before; it may not necessarily
always have been in the education sector but good client teams
are important. We found some contractors whose performance was
fairly consistent: contractors who were not building the best
schools were not building the best schools consistently and good
designers were consistently building good schools. So some good
architects were building good schools and some not so good architects,
I would certainly agree with you about that. Those were really
the four key things. We have a whole series of other recommendations,
but that is really at the heart of it.
Q196 Helen Jones: But when that happens
no-one seems to be held to account. If a local authority is about
to start on a building programme, should it not have access to
a list of firms or architects or whoever that have made a mess
of it in the past to ensure that they are not allowed to make
a mess of it somewhere else? Is that information available?
Mr Simmons: There are some fairly
serious legal constraints on doing that.
Q197 Chairman: Are there?
Mr Simmons: Yes, I should think
so. We can certainly provide evidence. Things like awards programmes
and exemplar projects tell you who the good people are.
Q198 Chairman: Under the privilege
of the House you can tell us all the bad ones right now and there
will be no legal problems.
Mr Simmons: Had I brought a list
with me. If you look at our design review programme, which looks
at projects like schools, you can certainly see who the good teams
are because you can see consistently who is getting good results,
you can also see who is not. There is quite a lot of information
out there already.
Q199 Chairman: Give it to this Committee
and I am sure you can do it under parliamentary privilege.
Mr Goddard: What a profound question.
Why did it go pear-shaped? In a sense what typifies a project
that goes pear-shaped is a lack of communication, a lack particularly
around the school connecting the design and build with the vision
of teaching and learning in that particular school and also, it
is about the capacity of the clients. Often what we are asking
people to do, and we heard this earlier, is to lead on a project
which is probably the biggest project they have ever done, either
as an individual or as a local authority or indeed as a head teacher.
Despite the plethora of enablers, despite all the client design
advisers, despite the DQIs, despite this, despite BREEAM, what
we still have, and it is shown from the CABE survey, is a danger
of creating schools which are not fit for purpose and that worries
me. One lesson we have learned is that you have to create a forum
where industry can talk to industry, schools can talk to industry,
outside of the frenzy of a bidding process. We have heard about
the 13 weeks and what cannot be done and what can be done. Often
architects' practices are designing for instance three schools
to put to a bidding process in 12 weeks and surely you cannot
do your best job designing three schools in 12 weeks? You also
cannot do your best job if you only have a matter of hours with
particular clients from one week to the next. What happens is
that there is a lack of relationship and a lack of the kind of
magic that can happen between client and professional and for
that very reason we are involved with others in setting up a new
membership body called the British Council for School Environments.
We have no organisation in this country that is dedicated to working
with industry and local authorities to share good practice, to
develop a common language which cuts across and cuts through all
of the silos which actually happen and can dangerously happen
in the building of public buildings including schools.
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