Examination of Witnesses (Questions 227-239)
MR ROB
SHED, MR
BARRY WHITE,
MR MIKE
BLACKBURN, MR
MARCUS ORLOVSKY
AND MR
NICK KALISPERAS
5 JULY 2006
Q227 Chairman: Gentlemen, can I welcome
you to our proceedings. You will know that the Committee has just
started our inquiry into sustainable schools, and by that we do
mean the full range of sustainability, both in terms of not just
the design, but we started off thinking about look at the design
and build of schools and then were convinced, talking to expert
colleagues of yours, that that was not good enough, so it is design,
build, the servicing, the transport too, what goes into that school,
the kind of teaching that we would expect in a school of the 21st
century—even how far the food comes if we get to it. So
it is an ambitious project and we need your help because, in a
sense, part of it is unknown territory for the Committee. We are
looking at publishing our Committee's Report on Special Educational
Needs and we learn a lot when we do an inquiry, but this really
does spread across a great deal of expertise we do not usually
get involved with, certainly in the construction world, but we
are learning, and halfway through an inquiry we become dangerous
because we do have some information, so it is your job to make
us dangerous! So, Mike, let's start with you, you were invited
to come to this Committee hearing on the sustainable school. Tell
us a little bit about what you feel about what a sustainable school
is going to look like in the 21st century.
Mr Blackburn: BT's main interest
is in the ICT element of what happens in schools, but sustainable
schools in the future for us are about radically looking at transforming
the learning and teaching processes within a school rather than
necessarily the building per se or the technology; starting off
with what is the vision for our learning, what skills are we looking
to achieve, what we are trying to get out of the schools at the
end of the day, and how best do we go about making the teaching
and learning the best and most comprehensive for both the pupils,
the young people, when they come out, for industry when they take
on board those young people as they leave school or go on to university.
It is not just about the school itself but about the school being
open for the community, for the wider access. If a community school,
a school being an intrinsic part of the community, very much thrives
then the community thrives and, therefore, to get a sustainable
school for the future is about looking at the whole comprehensive
vision, starting with that first. Once you start with the comprehensive
vision and agree the vision for what is required for those kinds
of schools, then you can looking at what is required to achieve
that vision. So we start at the very former part, what is the
vision for the 21st century, learning and teaching.
Q228 Chairman: So you would spend
all the money on the inside, the technology. You do not care so
much about the fabric of the buildings, is that right?
Mr Blackburn: No. We do care about
the fabric because the ICT and the fabric of the school are intrinsic
and need to be linked. To be silly about it, if you have a completely
closed school where you cannot use technology in an open way then
the two things are not mixed. You have to get the two things absolutely
right, together, and in the BSF programme you have that capability
to do that if you so desire.
Q229 Chairman: Do you know of people
who have got it right?
Mr Blackburn: Doing it together?
Not yet, no. I have seen some people doing the building programmes
extremely well, and I have seen some people who have taken the
ICT element away from the building programme and do that extremely
well. I have not yet personally come across an area where they
are doing both well, and then engaging with the wider community
as well, and with the teaching profession and with location-based
industry or the FE colleges in the location, so not comprehensively
yet, no.
Q230 Chairman: Thank you. Mike, can
we hold that, and Nick, would you like to tell us what your vision
is? Can you take us somewhere and tell us: "Here is the future
and it works?"
Mr Kalisperas: There is very little
that Mike said that I would disagree with. In part obviously I
would say that because BT are one of our members, but I think
from my perspective the first thing I would do is actually ask
the end users, the teachers, the teaching profession, pupils,
what it is that they want from their schools in the future, and
take from them their views of what needs to be delivered.
Q231 Chairman: Who would you talk
to?
Mr Kalisperas: The teaching professions,
the academics, pupils, because different schools have different
requirements. In some ways the title of the programme, Building
Schools for the Future, already sets us down the path that there
is a concept here that we need to build schools, or we need to
build schools according to a certain template, and I think we
need to take one step back from that and say what is it that we
want from our schools, what are the outputs we want and what do
we want to deliver to pupils and teachers. If you look at other
major programmes, such as the national programme for IT, one of
the criticisms that has been levelled at that programme has been
the lack of interaction with the clinicians, the doctors, the
nurses, about the sorts of programmes they wanted, and this is
one of those instances where we need to avoid a lack of consultation
with the end-users—the teachers, and the students. I think
we have to start from that point and work backwards, as Mike said,
and then get to developing a set of requirements which reflects
what people want on the ground.
Q232 Chairman: That is very thoughtful.
We have enjoyed your submission. This Committee has always been
very suspicious of trade associations but I must say that the
information you gave us was most useful. Marcus, where do you
come from in this? What is your interest in the sustainable school?
Mr Orlovsky: Our interest really
is in trying to improve people's life chances and it is so hard,
because we are talking about schools so we are talking about an
institution which has sort of grown up over the last 150 years
as a place where we take youngsters and we hope to enable them
to make that transition from being a child into being a contributing
member of society, and we do various processes with them so they
pop out at the other end as tremendously valuable, advancing citizens.
What we then have is a raft of people who we employ to help do
that, who we have currently called teachers, because I think maybe
50 or 60 years ago the only real source of knowledge which you
could get came from someone who had that knowledge and who taught
me, and I was divided into a room and put there with this great
person—and that is what we all went through. But we can
all remember probably being at school and not learning very much
in some lessons, and also remember some things where we learned
a lot, which is maybe not what we should have learnt. So where
we are today is we have an enormous range of subjects available
to be taught, and if you take section 96 which is sort of the
list of accredited subjects there are 5,015 available to secondary
schools, 379 GCSEs, for example, with five examining bodies, and
that means we have a plethora of stuff. So if we want to be sustainable,
given that our world is changing incredibly quickly, and the world
today is very different from the world of 25-30 years ago, when
we might have thought: "Well, I'll get a job and keep it
for five, 10, 20 years", today I do not think young people
are coming out with that. So how do we make whatever is that intervention
sustainable? We can talk about building schools for the future
and building a school building in which we will place 1,500 kids
and 150 teachers and spend a lot of money on it, and go: "Aren't
we clever" and take photographs of it and it will look wonderful,
but is it going to do the purpose of helping somebody transform
from being 11-years-old coming from primary school into exiting
at 16 or 18 as a contributing member of society. I do not know.
And when we talk to the teaching professions a lot of people there
do not know because they do what they do because that is what
they have done, and if you talk to most heads and say: "What
would you do differently?", it opens up almost a Pandora's
box of getting to the very heart of what might I achieve, and
I suppose the real nub of it is we can make a building which can
pass a sustainability carbon footprint and all that, but not do
what we as a society are looking for that whole institution to
achieve. I suppose if I stand up in front of teachers I would
be saying: I do not want to denigrate what my colleagues are doing
because I think we are all doing the very best we can but at the
end of the day you would not choose to reprofile British Airways,
for example, by saying "Oh, we'll build a new headquarters
building." You would probably say at the very heart of it:
"What are we trying to achieve? What are the processes, the
people and the spaces in which to achieve it?" and now let's
embark upon something which we can see could be a sustainable
platform. The ICT is going to change immeasurably between now
and 10, 15, 20, 30 years' time; we are talking about creating
buildings which can house this ever-changing ICT. Society will
change. If you look at students today and the networks one can
grow up on having friends in Australia and talking to people in
New Zealand and be on your mobile. That was not available to most
of the people sitting on this Committee designing schools for
these people; it did not exist. So how are we going to create
whatever is the base for that to be sustainable, and I think when
we embark upon that we may find we get some quite surprising results.
We may find that the institution of schools may change, if we
allow it to, quite considerably. My colleagues to my right will
probably be saying there is much more opportunity for virtual
schools for people learning any time, anywhere; perhaps if I want
to learn graphics I do not need to do it with a teacher in a graphic
studio in a school, perhaps I will learn it through an equivalent
of almost an apprenticeship, and I may not need a physical space
in the school to do that and that is the direction from which
we come. So as much as possible we, within the existing frameworks,
try to do the very best we can and as much as possible we try
to work at the front end, and I guess that is with teachers and
students, to try and see are there some different requirements
coming through which might change the process which we are embarking
on, given that we all want the same outcome. We all want a successful
country and all want to see people achieving their maximum life
chances, and that is the direction from which we aim.
Q233 Chairman: I think the people
on this Committee would share those aspirations. What we have
been trying to do is learn how you get to that happy world where
you can achieve it. Barry White?
Mr White: My role in building
schools for the future is very much more at the delivery end.
At Skanska we have just set up the first local education partnership
in the country which was signed just this weekend, so we now have
the first education partnership up and running, and we will deliver
the first school under Building Schools for the Future in about
14 months' time. Our role is very much one of responding towards
what local authorities, schools and other stakeholders ask for
in Building Schools for the Future, so we are there to respond
to our customers' needs and, therefore, we take a brief from a
customer and interpret that and come up with a solution that will
do two things: one is ideally allow us to win that competition
in order to be able to deliver it, and, secondly, by interpreting
our customer's requirements, by delivering something that is sustainable
in the long term. Certainly from where I sit in Building Schools
for the Future I think if we can do one thing right it is to provide
a platform for leadership in schools, because I think that is
what will provide the real foundation for transformation, leadership
in schools, and that can be just by providing the facilities in
the broader sense, including ICT, that allow different ways of
teaching and learning to be delivered, but even at a more basic
level I think the challenges that teachers face every day are
also about things like administration and security, and in terms
of what we are delivering that has to be sustainable, and it has
to encompass those functions as well. A key approach we have is
flexibility because undoubtedly what we are delivering today is
going to have to be there for a long time and, therefore, what
we are designing and delivering is incorporating the possibilities
of having schools within schools, different types and ways of
delivering the curriculum. In addition, what we are looking to
do is make sure that what we are delivering during the construction
and operation is environmentally sustainable as well, so we are
looking at building in measures that allow ecologically friendly
ways of delivery and in terms of operation as well. A key part
of what we are doing, and this has been a major change under the
BSF programme, is that we are now focusing on how we develop our
solutions to facilitate educational outcomes, and the industry,
because of BSF, has had a major shift in this focus in that for
years we did focus on buildings, and that was understandable because
that was very much what we were being asked to focus on, and really
under BSF we are focusing on educational outcomes and how our
role helps that and we are part of it, but we also acknowledge
we are just part of it and we do need ICT partners and school
leadership to allow that transformation to happen.
Q234 Chairman: Is there not a problem,
though, in the sense that you are a very big player in the construction
world, you are a pretty sophisticated global player, and you are
going into schools where there is a head and a group of governors,
and you must look at them like lambs to the slaughter, must you
not? You have all that expertise, all that knowledge—they
must be a dream client. They have hardly anybody that knows anything
about it, they have never built anything before, they have never
been a client before, and you can have your wicked way with them,
can you not?
Mr White: Quite the reverse I
would say. Our experience, for instance, with local authorities
over a number of schools projects is that they are sophisticated
clients that typically have procured complex projects before—
Q235 Chairman: What, the average
head?
Mr White: Well, generally the
procurement takes place where the local authority is the central
procuring body, and we then work with many different head teachers.
Q236 Chairman: But heads play quite
a large part in this?
Mr White: They play a very large
part in terms of how the design is developed and how the solution
is arrived at, which I think is absolutely right because they
are the people who are going to use the school, so typically in
working for one local authority, the solutions we will come up
with for each school will be very different because the head teachers
will have a huge influence on the solutions we develop.
Q237 Chairman: But what would you
say, Barry—and you have just heard what Marcus said about
this inspirational vision of what education should be in the future—if
you have gone in, you have talked to the head and people a little
bit about where you are going to build the school, perhaps someone
from the LA, and they came up with the sort of thing that he mentioned
and you go back and talk to Rob and say, "They are a bunch
of lunatics; they are dreamers; they want something that I do
not understand, and I don't know how to build it. Perhaps we can
build them some tin shacks and take them down in five years' time
and put something else up"?
Mr White: I think if we ever stopped
listening to what our customers wanted we would never be very
successful, so I think we are looking to really listen, and part
of being successful in industry is listening to what people want,
and we know that only by listening and delivering what people
want and are asking for, and adding value to that.
Q238 Chairman: What if they do not
want what Marcus wants? What if they have a really conventional
view of what school they want. They want a very familiar school,
a school that is a kind of today's version of the great Victorian
schools that were built in the 1850s? What if that is what they
want?
Mr White: Up to a point that is
more an issue for the national programme and for the LA than for
us, almost—
Q239 Chairman: But you are head of
education. Would you say to a head or a group of people commissioning
you, "Come and let me show you what we have done. Let's inspire
you by taking you to some innovative sustainable school."
Could you do that?
Mr White: Yes, and we do. What
we do as well is we bring in examples of what we are doing in
Finland, Sweden and America and we can show you—
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