Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
TY GODDARD,
RICHARD SIMMONS,
STEVEN MAIR
AND DAVID
RUSSELL
14 JULY 2008
Q1 Chairman: I now welcome Ty Goddard,
Richard Simmons, Steven Mair and David Russell. I apologise for
the slight shortening of the session, which is the result of the
previous emergency session on the testing system. Most of you
were in for that, so you will know that it was rather important.
Ty Goddard is director of the British Council for School Environments.
Richard Simmons is chief executive of the Commission for Architecture
and the Built Environment. Steven Mair is Assistant Executive
Director, Resource and Infrastructure, Children, Young People
and Families for Barnsley Council. David, I believe that you,
too, are from Barnsley Council.
David Russell: I am the Programme
Manager for Building Schools for the Future in Barnsley.
Q2 Chairman: I shall give each of
you a chance to say a little about BSF and where it is at the
moment. We do not need your biography or your CV, just a quick
minute and a half on how you see the programme at the moment.
Steven Mair?
Steven Mair: Within Barnsley,
we are taking out all our secondary and specialist schools and
replacing them with new build across the whole borough in one
wave. We see it as a tremendous opportunity for the children,
the pupils and learners within the borough. Where we are in the
process is part-way through the competitive dialogue, and we are
targeting a preferred bidder in October. We have a tight and condensed
procurement programme, and assuming that we get to October our
plan is that all our estate will be replaced by 2011-12—within
the next three to four years. Combined with our primary programme,
that will put over half the children in Barnsley in 21st-century
schools within the next four years.
Q3 Chairman: Thank you for that.
David?
David Russell: I can only repeat
what Steven said.
Chairman: I should have known that you,
being from Barnsley, would be straight and succinct.
David Russell: It is the same
answer.
Q4 Chairman: Good. Ty Goddard?
Ty Goddard: In many ways, if we
were to give a head teacher's report on building schools for the
future, we would say, "Very slow start to the task, but now
seems willing to listen to the advice of others." For us,
as an organisation with more than 300 members from both the public
and the private sectors all intimately involved in schools investment,
we have a sense of partnership for schools, and the Government
are beginning to listen more. Indeed, I think that the Committee's
seventh report Sustainable Schools; Are we building
schools for the future? played a major part in looking at
this in terms of a system-wide response. What we welcomed in the
Committee's report was that you were able to take all the key
bits of that investment and look at them holistically. The head
teacher would continue: "If this investment is to reach its
full potential, it needs to remember the original question."
The original question, as you quite rightly said in your last
report on BSF, was about the transformation of teaching and learning
in this country.
Q5 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Richard Simmons?
Richard Simmons: We have been
running our design assessment programme with Building Schools
for the Future for a few months. We have seen a relatively small
number of projects. We are reviewing all projects from wave 4
onwards, so it is at an early stage. We are seeing measurable
improvements, by seeing projects through their first stage and
then their final bid stage. We do not think that the quality is
yet good enough, but there is a will from Partnerships for Schools
to improve it. There are some specific areas that need improving,
one of which Ty has just mentioned, such as transformational education,
sustainability strategies and so on. We are now seeing more new
designs that are better than the schools they are replacing, which
is very positive. Design still needs to have a stronger weighting
in the selection of local education partnerships than it has at
the moment.
Q6 Chairman: Thank you. You have
all been very succinct. Ty, we are always pleased when people
say nice things about reports, but that will not stop you getting
some hard questions from us. What worries those of us who have
followed through the reports on the progress of Building Schools
for the Future when we attend conferences and seminars is the
fact that the visioning process is very patchy between different
local authorities. The Committee really welcomed it; Barnsley
and other local authorities have given it a chance. They have
really thought about the sort of secondary education provisions—long
term, the whole bit—that we want in the 21st century. Others
that have gone through the BSF process seem to have done so in
a rather patchy and pragmatic way. They do not seem to have had
a serious go at the vision. Is that your experience, Richard Simmons?
Richard Simmons: Yes. At the moment,
we are finding a wide range of understanding about what the transformational
education agenda might mean. On our right is an authority that
seems to have approached it very well, thought about what it wants
to achieve, what kind of schools are needed and how to form a
contract to achieve that. Other authorities are finding it less
easy. We certainly welcome the fact that Partnerships for Schools
will now bring forward authorities that are ready to go, rather
than necessarily leaving them in serried ranks whether they are
ready to go or not. We need more opportunity to have much earlier
conversations with local authorities about what they want to achieve
from the educational agenda, as well as simply replacing the capital
stock. No doubt Tim will say more about that. We need further
work done, particularly on how to link the vision for education
and the vision for the actual design and management of a school.
Q7 Chairman: Ty Goddard, if that
is the case, and if you agree with it, who do you blame?
Ty Goddard: We are attempting
not to blame anyone. The key issue is who is responsible for owning
the transformation of teaching and learning. You are right. The
Committee will see a vast spectrum of responses to the investment.
You spent a lot of time listening and talking to people from Knowsley
during the last report. The Knowsley experience and the Barnsley
experience would be different from other authorities, but time
and time again we have underestimated how complex the job is of
thinking through what teaching and learning will be like in five
or 10 years, let alone in 15 to 20 years. In our evidence to the
Committee this time, we wanted to give you an opportunity to hear
the views from the ground. You will see from our evidence that
often we are not investing in change management properly. Too
often, we think that transformation will happen just because someone
is shown a PowerPoint or someone mentions it 11 times in a speech.
People who are already pressured in terms of the leadership of
schools or in respect of being teachers in schools have to take
part in a procurement process that, in itself, does not stimulate
the sort of new thinking and the time for thinking that we need.
People often succeed in developing their visions in spite of the
present procurement process, not because of it.
Q8 Chairman: Any comments?
David Russell: We found that the
idea of transformation, when we started discussing things with
schools, was fairly low key. Obviously, we realised that our heads
and their senior management teams had to go into new buildings
and operate the new buildings from two years hence pretty much
seamlessly. In the two years that we have been discussing transformation—the
designs, briefs and visions—we have seen a marked movement
of their understanding of what transformation is, to the point
where we are almost accepting designs. We have two bids on at
the moment. We know that shortly after we have chosen the designs,
we shall look at them again and review them, because the senior
management teams have moved on significantly from the point where
they were three months ago. We are seeing the senior management
teams within the schools progressing in that thought process.
We are certainly seeing it with our second phase schools as well—they
are developing and moving much further along the spectrum. It
is gradually moving, but we have to be aware that these senior
management teams have to go into schools in two or three years'
time and still operate and produce the outputs, in terms of education.
So we have had to deal with it with a certain amount of tenderness,
careful of the situation that we have been in with the senior
management teams. We can certainly see that. Both our bidders
have very good design teams, very good educationalists. If you
like, they have been pulling us along. There is still room for
some movement. We think that that will happen through the first
phase, and certainly through the second and third phases. It is
a moving process, but we have to be very careful about how and
at what point we commit and allow things to move on.
Q9 Chairman: Steven, do you have
anything to add to that?
Steven Mair: The authority began
the overall visioning process in 2003. I think that is a key point.
We began it two years before we were actually receiving the BSF
funding—or the announcement that we were going to get it.
That is very important. We started with a strategic approach.
We engaged with our heads very early on, because we want to continue
our step change in learning and we had a number of school places
issues to address. What we have tried to look at is overcoming
some of the disadvantages and the barriers. In our case, we are
not simply producing schools—we term them "advanced
learning centres", and we are wrapping care and other provision
around them. An example of a barrier would be a child in one corner
of the borough having to go to another corner of the borough to
receive a service. If we can bring the services to the child,
that helps attainment, because the child is not out of the school,
and it focuses people on the child and not on the service, which
is what this is all about. We are also looking at the pattern
of the school day. You can find some schools at the moment that
can open at 8.30 and can shut at 2.30. We are going for extended
hours—8 in the morning until 10 at night, bringing in full
community facilities as well. The key thing is that the visioning
process has to start early, and BSF is simply a vehicle to deliver
changes in learning, which we term "remaking learning".
Chairman: Thank you for that. We shall
open up the questioning now. May I just say that it is a pleasure
to see two young people at the back of the Committee today who
would be, will be and are using schools at the moment. It is very
nice to have you here. We do not often have the real consumers
present. Thank you for being here.
Q10 Mr Chaytor: In respect of the
concerns about procurement; is part of the problem the elaborate
structure that was set up through the local education partnerships?
Had we not had the LEP structure, could local authorities have
got on with procurement more quickly? I suppose that is a question
to someone from Barnsley first, but also to Ty and Richard perhaps.
Steven Mair: I do not think it
is the LEP itself. We fully accept that it is a very complex process.
I think there are some improvements. Our colleagues are becoming
pragmatic as we go along, and we are moving things along more
quickly. What we have to remember, certainly in our case, is that
we are transforming the entire estate. For Barnsley, this is a
massive financial investment. It is a £1 billion-plus contract.
We want to get this right. We will get this right. We will improve
learning as a consequence. We think it is well worth the investment
in time and money that the council and the schools are putting
in to get this right. The contract period is 25 years. Some elements
of the school design life are 60 years. Quite frankly, we are
probably putting up schools now that will be here next century.
It is worth that time and investment to get it right. A tremendous
advantage that we see is the competitive dialogue process. As
David described, we have two very good bidders. They are committed
to the scheme and we are pushing them through the process. Keeping
them in competition and pushing them, we are getting advantages
out of that. That is what we intend to continue doing until we
are totally content that what we are getting is right.
Richard Simmons: One of the critical
issues is the fact that the LEP is a partnership that will last
for some considerable time. As we have heard, a lot of the focus
at the moment is on what happens upfront—the first round
of schools. As we said in our submission, about 80% of schools
built by such programmes will not be part of the initial bid.
The question is about how to maintain and sustain the partnership,
and secondly, how to keep innovating so as to pick up on the transformational
education agenda as we go along. The Commission for Architecture
and the Built Environment's position is that all procurement methods
produce bad buildings. There is evidence for that. It is about
how they are managed and used. The more the procurement process
is used to produce a partnership that will stick together, deliver
in the long run and deliver changes in how IT might be used in
schools over the years, for example, the better the results will
be. At the moment, not enough weight is given to design upfront,
and we are concerned to ensure that the momentum continues after
the partnership is formed.
Ty Goddard: Initially, the ambition
for BSF was vast. All the views from the ground seem to focus
on the complexity of the procurement process. The changes that
have been announced and are due to roll out are welcome. Partnerships
for Schools listened to industry and people in local government.
However, we still have a system that wastes money that should
be spent on schools. It duplicates effort from world-class designers
and builders, and it costs our colleagues in local authorities
a vast amount to do it properly.
Q11 Mr Chaytor: So where is the waste?
Ty Goddard: There are high
costs for bidders and the bidding teams have to draw up designs
that may never be used. They must be drawn up to a late stage,
so they are highly detailed designs. There is a sense out in the
country, and you have seen evidence from the Royal Institute of
British Architects, that we seem to be besotted with having to
put things in OJEU, the Official Journal of the European
Union, when local authorities have spent years looking at
procurement frameworks that they already have. We seem to be almost
besotted with the process of the process, rather than allowing
latitude. Because of the underspend, because targets were not
reached, we had what were called one school pathfinders. Although
complex at times, they have got rid of many of the hoops and the
testing that seems to go on. Although we have had best practice
recommendations from the world of construction and big reports
such as Latham and Egan, which explored how to find a partner,
we have a procurement process that was probably fit for purpose
in 2000, 2001 or 2003 when BSF was created. Is it up to speed
and can it respond to the new agendas that we have now in our
schools on children's services, regeneration and the big issue,
which was not even mentioned at the launch—sustainability?
Q12 Mr Chaytor: The Royal Institute
of British Architects has suggested that one way to shorten the
procurement process further is through what it calls smart PFI.
What is that?
Ty Goddard: Or smart BSF as it
also calls it. The voices of RIBA and CABE would want to join
in a critique of the procurement process and an attempt to work
through a design with a local authority, supporting that local
authority with experts in design. The Jo Richardson community
school in Barking and Dagenham was procured and commissioned using
a smart PFI route—the Committee may have visited the school.
The design was drawn up and put out to the market. If we are talking
about transformation in real time, rather than on paper, some
have suggested, including RIBA and others, that this is worth
testing. What has always baffled me is why we have not piloted
or attempted to test different types of procurement. We demand
that areas such as Barnsley innovate, we demand that our schools
innovate, and yet, we are locked into a procurement process that
probably has non-innovation at its heart. It demands that people
make decisions when their knowledge is least and that they meet
bid team after bid team when their time is short. Learning technologies
are moving so fast that the procurement process may create a risk-averse
culture.
Q13 Mr Chaytor: Do you think that
the Department could publish a booklet suggesting half a dozen
different models of procurement, in the way that it published
one some time ago suggesting half a dozen different designs for
schools?
Ty Goddard: I was in one of our
major shire counties on Thursday, visiting schools. Those schools
have been procured using the framework that they already had.
What we are seeing, which was in CABE evidence, is that there
is a fracturing of the procurement process already, but let us
do that by design, not by accident.
Q14 Mr Chaytor: Was that quicker
for that county council?
Ty Goddard: I think it was. In
the evidence that you have got from Knowsley, there is a table
that suggests two years for the process. Barnsley may want to
comment themselves.
Chairman: I am conscious that each section
here is short because of the previous sitting, so one person to
each question—rattle them off, please. I am sorry it has
to be like this; it is the time constraints around us.
Q15 Mr Chaytor: Okay, a final question:
in terms of the partnerships, who dominates? Is it the local authority
as manager; is it the voice of head teachers and teachers, in
terms of the practicalities of this work; is it the construction
industry; or is it the architects?
Richard Simmons: From our experience,
it is a bit early to say. We are seeing examples of all those
things: we are seeing some very dominant local authorities with
a clear vision for what they are trying to achieve; some powerful
contractors who are trying to drive the process in the direction
that they want to go; and some opinionated architects, but many
of them go in the end. It is probably a bit early to say who is
going to be the dominant force, but ultimately, the key issue
is that this has to be designed for the benefit of the young people
who will be in the school. We would like to see in the system
the young people themselves and the educationalists really empowered
to deliver.
Q16 Mr Chaytor: My next question
is to Barnsley. You said, Steven, that you started the visioning
process in 2003, but in terms of IT in learning, a lot has happened
in the last five years and even more will happen in the next five
years. To what extent are you confident that you are building
an IT infrastructure that will be sufficiently flexible to allow
for future development?
Steven Mair: I agree; it is a
developing field. If we could all see 20 years ahead in ICT, it
would be tremendous, but we are confident that we are building
something that will be sustainable. The IT contract is for five
years, unlike that for the buildings. We are building in a refresh
after five years, so we can look at what has come along. In five
or 10 years' time, children might be bringing in laptops or personal
digital assistants themselves, as with calculators now. We are
working with our partners and our advisers and thinking forward
as far as we can, but we are not committing to more than five
years and we are putting aside enough money, so that in five years
we can revisit that and make sure that we are not locked into
something that is out of date.
Chairman: Moving on to educational sustainability,
Annette, you are going to lead us.
Q17 Annette Brooke: Yes, I think
that that follows on rather nicely. I do not think that I have
quite got a handle on designing schools for the long term, because
we could divide that up into all sorts of time periods. To some
extent, that must almost be looking into a crystal ball, in terms
of what you are trying to achieve. As you have just touched on
the five-year chunks of time, Steven, perhaps I could start with
you. How much have you built into the projects of the visions
for different time periods ahead? You have mentioned 10 years,
but what about into the next century? How have you coped with
that?
Steven Mair: As I said, we started
with an authority-wide vision. We have individuals from each school,
so we are very much making these personalised buildings. They
are not imposed by the council. It is extremely important to get
buy-in from the people—the pupils, teachers and heads—who
will be using them in future. The key thing that we are trying
to build in is flexibility and adaptability, because, as you quite
rightly say, who can see so many years ahead? We are building
in break-out spaces and flexible walls, so there could be a classroom
of 30 next to another classroom of 30, but the wall comes apart
so that you could have a class of 60 with two teachers—one
teaching the majority of the children, or all of a level, and
one focusing on those who need additional help. There are differential
levels within classrooms. We are trying to take on board ICT as
far as we can, such as video conferencing. A lesson could be put
around the whole borough, again freeing up teachers to focus on
those with particular additional needs. We are building in the
children's services agenda, which a colleague referred to—this
wrap-around care. They are not schools; they are advanced learning
centres. We will have all our professionals at least hot-desking
in those schools, including the welfare service and the youth
service. We are engaging with our partners, the primary care trust
and the police, and they will be on site. As far as possible—nobody
can ever get it totally right—we are thinking and making
things as flexible as we can to accommodate what comes on in future.
Q18 Annette Brooke: May I move to
the other end of the table with a slightly different emphasis.
Are all the issues that we have just touched on regular features
of discussions in BSF projects?
Richard Simmons: Yes.
Annette Brooke: They really are?
Richard Simmons: They certainly
are, now that the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
is reviewing each local education partnership's proposals before
they come to final contract. Our assessment method, which is fairly
structured, is to look at a whole range of issues about flexibility
and whether learning environments can change over time. We are
very interested in ICT and how schools might adapt, so we might
build an ICT room but, with changes such as I have just described,
it can be used for another purpose. Another thing is building
for the long term. We are increasingly clear now that we have
to make schools that are going to be environmentally sustainable.
That means that sustainability has to be driven into the design
of the school from the outset. We know for sure that we will need
to have schools that rely much more on passive ventilation—in
other words, air that moves through the building without being
driven through it. We have to use natural light as much as we
can, and we are starting to see that become a much stronger feature
of school design. All those things are being discussed. To go
back to the beginning of the conversation, some authorities—Barnsley
is a good example—understand these issues now, and others
are still learning about them. We have to get the message out
from the more successful partnerships that are developing to the
newer partnerships that will develop in the future about how to
go about ensuring that they are planning for the long term.
Q19 Annette Brooke: We look around
and see masses of empty office buildings that will probably never
be filled. Will we need all these school buildings in the future?
Richard Simmons: I think probably
we will, because I am not sure that all those office buildings
will be in the right place for the young people whom we want to
use them.
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