Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
MR TY
GODDARD AND
MR RICHARD
SIMMONS
3 JULY 2006
Q200 Chairman: Is that related to
the British Council for School Design?
Mr Goddard: The British Council
for School Environments, BCSE.
Q201 Mr Marsden: Just picking up
this issue of how we can involve people in things that are going
to work rather than disasters, I apologise I had to be on another
instrument committee, so I was absent for about half an hour,
but it is very striking to me that in everything I have heard
so far the word "materials" has not passed anybody's
lips as far as I am aware. Surely one of the issues as to why
things went so badly wrong from the ideals of Corbusier and the
modern movement when they were then translated into buildings
in the 1950s and 1960s and the flat roofs is that actually nobody
thought about the cheapskate materials that many builders at the
time would actually use to realise these architectural gems. What
I should like to ask is who, in this whole procurement process,
is actually leading? Is there a materials tsar? Who is actually
leading or consulting people on what materials work? Teachers
have worked in classrooms with certain materials that have just
not worked in terms of heating or the finish has been appalling
or whatever. Where do materials come into all this?
Mr Simmons: It is a very important
point. In a previous job, I was involved in the development of
the Hackney Community College in Shoreditch and we had on the
site two former board schools from the 19th century and a 1960s
clasp school. The board schools could be refurbished and met very
high environmental standards; the clasp school had to be demolished
because it was unfit for purpose and could not actually be made
environmentally sustainable, in fact it could not be heated sensibly.
It is a very good point and there is some evidence which we have
put in from our colleagues in Scotland who are our partners, the
Scottish CABE as it were, which addresses materials very specifically
and there are several issues around materials. One is the extent
to which materials provide you with a good sound environmental
platform, so mass concrete, although not attractive unless treated,
is a very good way to retain heat in a building and makes it much
cheaper to heat and allows the use of passive ventilation; a jargon
term which means not having air conditioning or fans moving air
around.
Q202 Chairman: As in this building.
Mr Simmons: Yes. It is reasonably
comfortable even on a very hot day like today I guess. We found
in our survey that not enough schools, about 75%, had really taken
those issues on board. There are also issues around the toxicity
of materials on which I am not an expert but the BRE would be
and many materials used in building are not necessarily tested
to see whether, for example, they provoke asthma and so on. There
are several dimensions to the materials' issue. I guess BRE would
be more of an expert than I am on the subject.
Q203 Chairman: BRE?
Mr Simmons: Building Research
Establishment as was; they are now called BRE. They actually developed
BREEAM.
Q204 Mr Marsden: That is all very
important and very helpful but the issue I was also trying to
press out of you was that there was accumulated knowledge of teachers,
classroom assistants of what works and what does not work in terms
of materials in buildings. Maybe if some of them had been taken
on board in the mid to late 1960s we would not have had some of
the problems of flat roofs and everything that we know about.
What are the processes that are going into building schools for
the future that will allow those people and those groups and the
user groups themselves, the children, to have a say and say they
do not want one like the one that was built down the road five
years ago because the materials were rubbish.
Mr Simmons: They are limited.
Mr Goddard: Limited in that sense;
very, very patchy. We heard earlier as well, that the whole feedback
loop is weak. When you asked Richard to name and shame, organisations
like CABE and we have tried to focus on the good practice. That
is a way in terms of materials, in terms of what we put out there
in partnership with the DfES, but there is no one central place
where you can go and actually ask what the best range of materials
is, for instance for natural ventilation. I am not aware of it
but it may be somewhere like the BRE and it may be other organisations
as well. No, there is not one location to go for that information,
as far as I know.
Q205 Chairman: Is there sharing of
information? Teachers' TV is taking great interest in the proceedings
of this and trying to involve teachers. We went to one of the
London Academies in Bermondsey and they do not have automatic
lighting that cuts off as people leave the room "Because
one of the senior staff had worked in schools which had it. Because
the technology is not ready yet. If you want schools where the
light comes on all night and the caretaker gets rung up and so
on, you go for that technology". So they did not have it.
We have been to other schools where we say "Why did you not
have this sustainable element built in? "Because people said
the technology was not ready or it would be 10% more expensive
or we had to cut costs". That kind of feedback is very important
in materials, is it not?
Mr Simmons: Yes, we certainly
found that in some of the schools we looked at that there were
problems where they have fitted that kind of equipment, then could
not dim the lights in the classroom so their visualisers were
not effective. My colleague, Marie Johnson, who is the architect
who works on this project, has just reminded me of two things
really. The first is that sustainability is not really well specified
in briefs at the moment or in the building bulletins in the DfES
and that is partly because a lot of the thinking on the subject
is developing very rapidly. We found that quite a few people who
had had environmental management systems built into their schools—and
we found this by the way in all sorts of buildings, not just schools—did
not really understand them and could not use them properly and
they were too complex for them.
Chairman: David wants to ask you some
questions on that but let us finish this session on sustainability.
Q206 Mr Chaytor: This is the area
I should like to ask about and first of all come back to my earlier
question to the previous witnesses about the BREEAM standards.
Am I right in thinking that the BSF schools have to conform to
the BREEAM rating of "very good"?
Mr Simmons: That is correct, yes.
Q207 Mr Chaytor: But to reach that
standard, you do not have to score highly across all the criteria.
Is this a weakness in the system and what would it take in terms
of effort, imagination and cost to reach the BREEAM "excellent"
standard, which is their highest standard?
Mr Simmons: To save the Committee's
time, we have suggested that the DfES needs to look very hard
at this but actually the Sustainable Development Commission have
put in evidence on this subject which I would not really argue
with and they have gone into quite a lot of depth on BREEAM, so
it may be that you want to read that. I am not sure whether you
have seen the SDC evidence yet.
Q208 Mr Chaytor: I have not read
the SDC evidence.
Mr Simmons: They put in quite
a lot of evidence on BREEAM and it is not something that we would
particularly depart from. We certainly think a long hard look
is needed because the other thing about BREEAM and one of the
documents we put in for you is this Scottish document, Sustainability—Building
our Future Scotland's School Estate, which is an attempt to develop
a vision for sustainability and looks at a wide range of issues
including things like how food is sourced for the school canteen.
It looks at the broad local agenda 21-type definition of sustainability
which BREEAM does not really do. We should certainly say there
is a broader set of issues to be considered as well as those that
BREEAM covers.
Q209 Mr Chaytor: From your response
there and the previous set of responses, is it your feeling that
environmental sustainability is not as high up the agenda in terms
of the DfES's thinking on the BSF programme as it should be?
Mr Simmons: They have started
to work on it. They have put a set of initial guidelines on TeacherNet
on how to start thinking about sustainability in schools right
the way from developing new schools through to the curriculum
and teaching. They are not as far advanced yet as either the Scots
or people in continental Europe. What we actually found in our
survey was that the history of what has happened so far is not
that promising and probably a lot more guidance is called for.
Q210 Mr Chaytor: This was of 54 schools.
Mr Simmons: Fifty-two schools.
We have found that about three quarters of them have not really,
for example, looked as closely as they should have done at things
like passive ventilation, that they did have building control
systems that were too complex for them, that they have not really
taken a broad view of sustainability. To be fair, we did not have
time or the resources to look into the actual energy costs, so
I cannot speak about those.
Q211 Mr Chaytor: I am not arguing
that that is one of the single biggest factors that should be
taken into account in terms of the lifecycle cost of the building.
Mr Simmons: Absolutely; yes. We
looked at the physical design of the buildings and whether or
not we thought they would minimise it but, for example, you can
meet the specification on lighting standards in the classroom
entirely with artificial lighting. We did come across one school
where the library has no windows at all, but it meets the lighting
standards because it is fluorescent lit and yet there are ways
of designing classrooms where you can get roof lighting and windows
down one side which will give you good natural daylight across
the whole classroom without creating too much heat gain and so
on and there are good example of schools which have done that.
The issue for CABE, as it is on many other things, is consistency.
We should like to see consistent performance standards and consistent
specifications.
Q212 Mr Chaytor: Is that not the
purpose of the BREEAM standards? Is it not the function of the
Building Research Establishment to be the national centre for
good practice in these areas and it is amazing that we are so
way, way behind?
Mr Simmons: They provide some
very good advice on the subject but the question is whether it
is built into the briefs sufficiently and with enough force to
ensure it gets delivered.
Q213 Mr Chaytor: What is holding
it back? The Local Education Partnerships are the forum in which
these issues should be discussed between the client and the contractor.
Is it the natural conservatism amongst builders and construction
companies that they do not want to grapple with these issues or
is it the weakness of guidance from the DfES or weakness of the
prioritisation from the DfES? What are you saying is the source
of the trouble?
Mr Simmons: When I talked to the
head teacher of the Jo Richardson school who had had the school
built by Bouygues, they used a system of mass concrete, if I may
use a piece of jargon; they built the school principally out of
concrete and they have natural ventilation and so on. He said
that they were first class and this is what they wanted to do,
this is how they wanted to build a school, so I cannot say it
is necessarily the contractors, but it may be falling between
stools. The other thing is that there is an evolution going on
at the moment. We started with a PFI process, which left the private
sector to do most of the innovation and left them with a good
deal of freedom and did not specify too much. We are now moving—
Q214 Mr Chaytor: It also left the
school with the bill. If the original design brief had not built
in energy efficiency, the school budget was landed with the bill
of the higher energy costs.
Mr Simmons: Yes, because they
had to pay the contractor to go on providing facilities, management
and so on. I do not mean to sound completely negative here, because
we are learning; certainly DfES and Partnerships for Schools are
learning from this. They have broadened the procurement process
but they do now have a working party looking at standards. Coming
back to the point about materials that was made earlier, they
are trying to learn and this working party which my colleague
Marie Johnson sits on is looking at ways of specifying robust
materials and ones that will be more sustainable in the future.
There is a lot of learning going on at the moment.
Q215 Mr Chaytor: Would it be fair
comment to say that the BSF programme had been launched without
sufficient thought being given to the impact on the carbon footprint
certainly or the wider environmental implications of rebuilding
the nation's secondary schools?
Mr Simmons: That is quite a hard
question to answer.
Q216 Mr Chaytor: Yes or no would
do.
Mr Simmons: You could answer it
yes or no. I was just thinking about the experience we have observed
in continental Europe and there is certainly a lot of experience
out there that we could learn from, but you do have to start somewhere.
In a sense the reason we are having this hearing is because the
BSF programme exists and that is causing everyone to look at the
whole thing and it is by no means too late to make sure that these
things get built into the process because we are still at the
moment developing the Local Education Partnerships.
Chairman: This is why we need you, because
we want to learn from this experience of the last five years that
we have looked at. We also want to use the laboratory of the Academy
Programme which has 24 or 25 schools built. This Committee want
to learn how we can improve things by coming up with a Report
that adds value. We need your help and cooperation on that.
Q217 Mr Chaytor: You have raised
the problem of lack of capacity to measure the changes to energy
usage. Should smart meters be compulsory in any BSF school? Is
there an argument against not building in smart meters from day
one?
Mr Simmons: I should look at a
way in which everybody in the school can get some feedback on
what is going on, whether it is smart meters or more holistic
systems a look at the whole environment of the school. People
ought to know what their school is consuming and, going back to
the engagement of young people, they really care about this and
they really want to know why their school is not having a positive
effect on the planet. This is something which they care very deeply
about and giving them opportunity to look at that. It could also
be built into the curriculum, simple things which can be built
into the maths curriculum now. We have seen a couple of schools
where that kind of information is something which they can use
in the maths curriculum. It is very directly relevant and kids
can see the effect it is having.
Mr Goddard: To try to answer the
question you have asked a couple of times, what worries us is
whether current policy and practice allow us to build good sustainable
schools. We welcomed your Select Committee inquiry because there
were lots of noises from all over the country and from different
sectional interests about what was happening around sustainability.
For us, the Department for Education and Skills need to be praised
for putting sustainability on the agenda. I have a batch of information
here trying to define sustainability, trying to share good practice.
For instance, going back to an earlier question, you talked about
extended schools before and we have just written for the DfES
Designing for Extended Services. There is a willingness within
the Department for Education and Skills and indeed within Partnerships
for Schools, but we do need to step back and partly what you are
attempting to do is to cut through a mass of all sorts of details
to see where the conflicts are. If you talk to industry, what
they say is that it is very, very difficult within this bidding
process to put what could be initially expensive sustainability
themes within that building. No-one is prepared to take the risk
because it is a commercial process, it is rather frenzied and
people are bidding against one another, supply chain against supply
chain for quite valuable, big prizes. There has to be an inducement
for those people to use their great skills to innovate.
Q218 Chairman: Shall we slow the
whole process down?
Mr Goddard: No.
Q219 Chairman: Why not? Most of us
who have been around a reasonable amount of time know that if
there is enormous activity in the construction world, then resources
become very scarce, very scarce craftsmen, very scarce managers,
very scarce construction companies with good records of building
decent buildings. If you do all this in too much of a hurry, are
we not creating a kind of boom where there is a greater scarcity
than we need? We could take a more measured time to do all this.
Mr Goddard: I and a number of
other more expert people have wrestled with the whole issue of
slowing it down, but if you go to schools, as all of you will
in your constituencies and elsewhere, there is a need to get on
and replace those buildings. There is a worry that it is taking
too long already and that worries people in terms of momentum
that is needed.
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