Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
IAN FORDHAM,
SUNAND PRASAD,
DR RICHARD
SIMMONS AND
GRAHAM WATTS
OBE
21 JANUARY 2009
Q100 Mr Stuart: I was not clear.
Has there been a movement from private finance initiative to design
and build, as a result of the investment planning so far?
Sunand Prasad: So far, I would
say that it is too early.
Chairman: Too early to know.
Q101 Mr Stuart: I understand that
it was thought that that was likely to happen, but it was hoped
that there might be an increase in design and build and then,
when the market changed, a switch back to PFI. However, there
is no evidence for that.
Graham Watts: No, there is no
evidence for that at the moment. Could I return to that central
point about experienced clients? It is worth making the point
that the guidance and advice coming out from centralised public
sector authorities—such as the Public Sector Construction
Clients' Forum, the Office of Government Commerce, Partnerships
for Schools and so on—is of an extremely good quality. I
have been at CIC for 18 years and would say that the quality of
the guidance given to procurement officials nowadays is better
than it has ever been. Too often, there is a disconnect between
that central guidance and the decisions taken locally. It is an
age-old problem, but it is one of the issues that we need to address.
Q102 Chairman: Can I just push
on a little on the issue that Fiona opened with? Is there a crisis
in funding? You know, as well as we do, that there is another
major programme for primary education and that there is a very
big capital programme in further education, and we all understand
that there has been a rush to get big capital projects through
to the Learning and Skills Council, because people are worried
that the LSC will disappear by 2010. Everyone is getting their
bids in now. Is a crisis looming due to the lack of funding and
the number of schools and colleges rushing to get their bids in,
because they think that the money will run out?
Graham Watts: After a slow start,
all the evidence until recently was that the programme was picking
up. Indeed, the evidence of the early completions is that the
full year's programme of schooling carried out afterwards was
very good. The crisis is that that promising move and acceleration
could come to a full stop if the funding is not there, particularly
on the private sector side, to continue the work.
Chairman: So that is a crisis.
Graham Watts: Yes, potentially,
it is.
Dr Simmons: The crisis is in the
construction industry. Many firms in construction see schemes
such as BSF and LIFT as a way of staying in business. The question
is whether the collateral damage to firms from other parts of
the sector will be such that it will either weaken their ability
to attract investment capital or weaken the skills in the organisation.
As you know, a large number of people have already been made redundant
from the industry, and the estimate is that 30% of the work force
will possibly be gone by 2011. It is a question of whether we
can hang on to and improve the skills in the sectors that the
Government are still supporting, or whether firms that are having
to spread their bets across a wider range than in the past, when
losses from BSF could be spread across other programmes, will
now be so focused on BSF that losing a BSF scheme will be fatal
to the company. That is where the greatest danger lies from our
perspective.
Sunand Prasad: There is no crisis
in BSF. It remains an incredibly exciting and interesting programme,
and knowledge is being generated. At this point in our economy,
BSF ought to be part of the answer to the crisis, and the real
question is whether it is currently configured to be most effective
in answering that crisis. Can we bring schemes forward fast enough
to have a real impact on the economy? So far the evidence is that
we cannot. How can we put measures in place that release the true
potential of BSF, not only to transform education, but also to
deal with the economy?
Q103 Chairman: But, Sunand, the
Government have been saying that they will use the construction
industry and public sector construction projects in both health
and education to get us through the recession. It would be tragic
if a lack of finance stopped that process.
Sunand Prasad: It would be tragic
if either a lack of finance or an inability to innovate a little
more in procurement systems prevented that from happening.
Q104 Chairman: BSF was accepted
with cross-party support by everyone in the education sector,
because it was the first time that any Government had said, "Look,
we want you to have a vision of teaching and learning that is
innovative and creative. If you come up with a vision of what
you want education in your local authority area to be into the
21st century, you will get money for construction." Does
that still hold? Is that still the inspiration from your perspective?
Sunand Prasad: I would say that
it is. Absolutely. We know from best practice what can be achieved.
There are high-performing LEAs with transformational visions that
are doing the right thing and achieving great results. However,
we are not getting sufficient spread of that across the piece.
It is improving, but the questions are whether it is improving
fast enough and how can we, side by side with doing things such
as loosening fiscal restraints, help centrally local authorities
to be better at getting the results that we are all after?
Dr Simmons: There is no doubt
from the people who we are meeting through the design review and
the various forms in which we share learning that that is at the
heart of what people are trying to achieve through the program.
It is still seen that way. The issue is about whether all local
authorities have the skills to deliver that at the moment or access
to the skills. One of the good things—let us talk about
the positive side—is the huge enthusiasm on the part of
head teachers, teachers and LEAs to share the learning that is
going on at the moment. We are about to add some educationalists
to our design review panel, so that we can get some more of that
force behind the programme. Everyone understands the ambition
and is keen to share it, but not everybody at the moment has the
skills or necessarily the resources when they need them at the
front end of the programme. From the work that we are doing, it
is clear that, as Sunand said, it is really important to spend
more time, before bidding or joining the programme, preparing
your vision and thinking it through carefully, while still having
a dialogue with designers about how to realise the vision through
the buildings. It is very interesting that people are saying that
pedagogy has not yet been shown to be improving through the design
of schools. We have seen some schools where that is happening,
so that definitely needs to be shared more widely. When you see
that happening, you start to see the school's performance transforming
as well, based on conversations with the heads.
Q105 Chairman: Where is that coming
from, Richard? You say that pedagogy is changing, but when we
held our original inquiry, we could not find such schools and
innovations showing new ways of teaching and learning. It is all
very well having that and talking about personalised learning,
on which an inquiry has been going on for three years—in
some respects it is a bit late for BSF—but if you are designing
schools, the ideas for teaching and learning that inform the build
of the school must come either from the Department or locally.
Where is it coming from, if anywhere at all?
Dr Simmons: By and large—this
is not universally true—we are seeing it coming from very
imaginative head teachers, chairs and governors working with very
imaginative people in the LEAs. They have the opportunity to influence
the design outcomes of the schools. There are people who want
to innovate in learning. On Friday, I was at a school from the
old PFI programme, which, unfortunately, was not a design success.
The school's ambition is being inhibited by the fact that the
design has not worked, which means that it cannot achieve what
it wants. However, its ambition remains, and it is doing the best
that it can. As far as we are concerned, it is about getting those
clients together with good architects and then sharing what they
are doing with other people, so that they can understand the differences.
Q106 Chairman: Graham, hand on
heart, do all local authorities still need that vision? Or are
some authorities getting away with a traditional but new build?
You know what it looks like—corridors with classrooms for
30 kids on either side. Are we building any of those?
Graham Watts: Well, I think that
they are still happening. Only 42 schools were opened under the
BSF programme by the end of December. I think that I am right
in saying that only about 1.3% of eligible schools have joined
in the wave so far. It is very early days. I think that there
are some ideological issues in some local authorities about opting
into the BSF programme, because they do not want to outsource
elements of the schools operation and those sorts of things. Going
back to the original question, I feel that some evidence is already
beginning to emerge of improvement in the learning process and
in the schools environment through the early schools that have
closed. I have seen some figures—
Q107 Chairman: Early schools that
have closed?
Graham Watts: I am sorry. Early
schools that have finished.
Dr Simmons: Closed the contract.
Graham Watts: Closed the contract—thank
you, Richard. I have seen some data about examination results
improving, and the percentage of students feeling safer is up
30%; the percentage of students feeling proud of their schools
is up 33%; and vandalism is down 51%. That sort of information
is beginning to come out of the process. 3[3]
Q108 Chairman: There are 42 schools.
What I am asking you is, of those 42, how many are visionary and
different, and how many are traditional schools of the type that
I have just described?
Graham Watts: Of the ones that
I have seen, which I have to say is not very many of those 42,
I think that there is something visionary about all of them, particularly
in terms of the design quality within the school.
Q109 Chairman: We all get in a
panic to build, so will we not just revert to the attitude of,
"Let's just put up a new school, cut corners and forget the
vision" ?
Sunand Prasad: Yes, if we get
into a panic to build. However, there is absolutely no reason
why we should get into that panic. As we keep saying, it has been
done very well in places. What we must do is to make that the
rule. There is not actually anything incredibly surprising about
what is needed here; it is just that not everybody is up to speed
on that, and we have to help the people who are not quite there
to be there. Then they will not panic.
Q110 Mr Stuart: All of you make
money out of this enormous, multi-billion pound programme, and
yet the second annual report evaluation of BSF says, "Teachers
... were less convinced that the teaching spaces were flexible
and adaptable ... It is too early to point to a clear link between
new or refurbished school buildings and improvements in pupil
attainment, although there was a clear message that the buildings
alone would not raise attainment, unless accompanied by other
changes ... Our results mirror the existing literature in not
finding a strong correlation between the two"—that
is, basically, between these changes and pupil attainment and
improvement. So we have a failing school system that, after a
doubling of expenditure, has seen the number of children who are
NEETs—not in education, employment or training—at
16, 17 or 18 remain unchanged after 12 years of economic growth;
we have a crisis of competitiveness; and we have people effectively
abandoned because of a lack of opportunity and a lack of attainment.
At the same time, we are pouring billions into a building programme,
for which there seems to be no evidence at all that it will tackle
the fundamental source of those problems. Can you comment on that
as a critique?
Chairman: I do not want a seminar on
those issues. Could you come back briefly on that, please? Who
wants to start?
Ian Fordham: I will start. Let
us take a step back. What is this all about? It is about great
schools. What do we want for our schools, for our education? If
you use quite a narrow metric around attainment, clearly things
may not necessarily be improving in the way that perhaps somebody
wanted them to improve. If you are looking at those broader outcomes
that we want to achieve, including higher attainment—obviously,
the Department for Children, Schools and Families has put a consultation
out about those broader outcomes. If you are measuring it just
by that metric, yes, there needs to be improvements. Going back
to the point about how you can hard-wire this into the system,
then how you can take teachers on board and say, "What is
the link between what you are doing in the classroom and how this
new building programme is developing?", is absolutely essential.
I think that an opportunity is provided by the economic downturn,
from the point of view of our taking stock and saying, "How
do we actually move the system forward, how can we bring about
that kind of innovation in the system?" I do not think that
BSF is a failure; I do not think that the Primary Capital Programme,
or PCP, is a failure. As somebody who is working in the not-for-profit
sector, I would challenge the issue around making money from the
programme. However, I think that this is what we are all about:
from our different perspectives, we are all about achieving great
schools. How can you actually take people on that journey? The
Government's ambition is very big and challenging. However, I
think that we are all, from our different perspectives, trying
to find ways of improving the system and I think that those simple
metrics around league tables are a bit of a misnomer. I think
that it is about those broader outcomes that we are looking for,
which is about engaging the hard-to-reach and those NEETs you
mentioned, as well as being about just the crude attainment tables.
Dr Simmons: That analysis, by
Mr Stuart, is a fairly gloomy analysis, I think.
Chairman: He is just trying to provoke
us all.
Dr Simmons: I thought that that
might be the case. What we are seeing coming through the design
process now is not conventional school design. In terms of the
schemes that are being brought through the system, which have
not yet been built, we are not seeing that old-fashioned school
that you describe. We are seeing, broadly, five different types
of school, which are trying to learn from some of the best, such
as Bristol Brunel. There is already some learning getting out
there in terms of what is being built. I think that it is too
early to judge yet because we have not seen that many new schools
built. To say that you can transform education as a result of
building 42 schools suggests a dramatic result, and if we achieved
that it would be great.
Q111 Mr Stuart: The killer line
from the official report is, "The results as a whole suggest
a positive impact of capital on attainment"—hurrah—"but
the magnitude is likely to be very small. We also found evidence
for considerable diminishing returns to capital investments."
Given the crisis in our education, the challenges we face and
the urgency of dealing with them, what would make an incoming
Government continue pouring billions of pounds into this particular
programme?
Dr Simmons: You need to remember
where this programme started, which was originally around the
quality of the school estate. Schools were leaking, they were
not well maintained, so it was about trying to bring some innovation
to that. Educational transformation, very sensibly, has been brought
in because while you are changing the physical structures and
dealing with the estate management issues, the opportunity also
needs to be taken to improve learning.
Q112 Mr Stuart: But is it a false
promise? There seems to be no evidence—
Chairman: Give them a chance. I am going
back to the witnesses, who will respond to your question.
Sunand Prasad: As someone who
is engaged on a day-to-day level, the picture you have drawn is
not one I recognise at all. The excitement in schools before and
after construction is truly inspiring when it happens, and it
does happen. We need to interrogate that matrix because earlier
on Graham read out some others, which seemed to contradict that.
Q113 Mr Stuart: He gave an anecdotal
view of having seen some data that suggested that, whereas I am
looking at the formal evaluation, which comes to opposite conclusions
and seems to suggest—
Chairman: Which none of us have had a
chance to read.
Sunand Prasad: There are other
things in the formal evaluation. I do not recognise that picture
and the key point is that it takes a long time for a building
to be designed and built—three years minimum, probably more.
We must not go on about the old picture. There was an earlier
phase of BSF, which has produced the completed schools. BSF and
Partnerships for Schools have learned a great deal from that early
experience and have put in place really good measures. We do not
think that they go far enough, but they nevertheless have put
in place some very good measures, the results of which are now
beginning to come through in the designs that we are seeing, which
will be on the ground in probably two or three years' time. The
fact is that these are slow-moving programmes and the time to
market is quite long, and I would not panic about those kinds
of figures. The evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, is that this
will work if we do it right.
Chairman: We are going to drill down
on this.
Q114 Paul Holmes: We have had
various comments on design quality and education outcomes and
so forth. To return to that issue in more detail, when the first
wave of academies opened five or six years ago there was a lot
of criticism that some of the new buildings were not very good;
others had poured a fortune into a stylistic statement that did
not have much to do with education and could even hinder it. When
the first few BSF schools were opened and this Committee, in its
previous form, did a report about them there was a lot of concern
from people like you that the design was not coming up to promise.
Now that more have opened—although there are still not many—where
are we? In general, is the design meeting expectations?
Dr Simmons: I suppose I should
start, because we are actually looking at what is coming through
the system at the moment. We are seeing improvements. We are still
seeing many schools at the first review. We generally do two reviews
and people come back for a third or fourth bite as they have to,
but generally we see schemes twice. We are seeing definite improvements
between the first review and the second review, so that the number
of very poor schools is diminishing. As you will know, the Government
are proposing to produce a minimum design standard, so that schools
that are truly poor do not get built at all. What that will comprise
will be announced shortly and we are working with Partnerships
for Schools. I think that that will make a big difference, certainly
in helping people to understand what the benchmark is. Below a
certain level, you just should not spend public money on some
of what is being proposed and being built. So we are seeing an
improvement. As a result of Partnerships for Schools issuing new
guidance, we are also seeing much better briefing; architects
and contractors are working with better briefs and that is helping
the process as well. At the moment, we are still looking for improvement
in three key areas. One is environmental strategies. No school
that we have seen has yet achieved excellence in its use of resources,
although some are good. We are looking for better civic presence;
we see too many schools that still use a fence as their boundary
with the neighbourhood, rather than a front door. That is often
because of the nature of the site that the architects and the
contractors are given. In some cases it may be that the cards
are already stacked against the project because of the site. I
suppose that I have already talked about the third area: educational
transformation. We need more of a learning spread. Those are the
kinds of areas that we think we need to see most improvement in
at the moment. The story is positive but it could be a lot better.
We would still like to see far more good and very good schools
coming through.
Q115 Paul Holmes: So, there are
no more horror stories like the school that had no playground,
no green space. That was a brand new school, which could have
been there for 30 or 40 years, but with no green space. There
is nothing like that at the moment.
Dr Simmons: We are trying to weed
those out, so there should be none in the future. Of course, the
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment does not
see every school; we do not see refurbishments, for example, because
generally they do not fit with the model of design review. Once
the partnership has been formed, we have to be careful to keep
up the pressure on producing good design. Part of the point about
the post-occupancy evaluation that we touched on earlier is to
make sure that once a partnership has been formed, there are checks
to ensure that the high standard set at the outset is continued.
Those risks have to be managed as a programme develops.
Sunand Prasad: The horror stories
should disappear. The CABE design review and minimum standards
should take care of that. I am pretty convinced that they will
take care of that. What we want to do, however, is to go a bit
beyond that. We want to have transformational education—education
that is focused on the children and the staff. Our concern is
how to achieve that in the best way possible. Looking back at
successful projects—not only in BSF but in other programmes,
such as the arts lottery—we know that when designers and
the people who need the facility get together and work out what
they want, and what they want then gets built through as simple
a process as possible, you get the best results. How can we, while
protecting the public purse and dealing with the risk—which
is what many PPP and design, build, finance and operate models
are predicated on—allow there to be the interfaces between
designers and users that ensure we get the best possible designs?
We are going to come back to the issue of local authority skills—client-side
skills—and the procurement process, which at the moment
tends to get in the way of that. We need to be imaginative and
creative with certain constraints perceived in the European rules,
which other European countries do not seem to be so bound by;
we seem to interpret them more strictly. We believe that we will
be more able to do the sensible thing if we look a little harder
at this picture.
Q116 Paul Holmes: One of the early
criticisms was that the Government had not provided, say, 10 different
standard blueprints and said, "Why don't you work around
those?", although other people said, "Oh, no—you
do not want to stifle innovation." In some of your earlier
comments you seemed to suggest that good practice samples are
now emerging. Where are we on that?
Dr Simmons: Shall I start on that
again? We certainly oppose the idea of five standard schools built
everywhere because we think that that is a failed model. There
are certain things that you can set standards for and standardise
around, and that means that you can put more of your design time
into two key things: the innovation around education environments
and so on, and making the school part of, or having it add to,
its civic context. We have seen some interesting schools recently.
In one school in Southwark people want to incorporate business
units alongside the school so that young people can experience
business at first hand and see how businesses operate on site.
A lot of the design resource should focus on how you can achieve
that kind of thing in the design. But, as the programme is seeking
innovation, there are some dangers in saying that everything should
be standardised, because that will automatically stifle the ability
of teachers, head teachers, the industry and the LEAs to come
up with new ways of learning that they want to use to improve
standards. There is a balance to be struck, and at the moment
there is a lot of guidance on standards. I suppose that the key
thing is how smart you are at using those standards effectively—for
example, if there are problems with the limits on how much floor
space you can fund, whether you can find ways to make that floor
space more adaptable, so that you can use it for personalised
learning some of the time and for more general classroom activity
at other times. It is in those areas that smart design is important.
Q117 Paul Holmes: CABE has provided
enablers—skilled architects—to take a lead and advise
other people. Is much use being made of that?
Dr Simmons: Yes, all education
authorities that are part of BSF have access to them and are using
them. We are talking to BSF about using them much earlier in the
process, because client design advisers are also appointed to
advise the client once the programme is under way, so we are now
looking at whether we can use our enablers much earlier in the
process to help the conversation about the educational vision
and how it would be applied to briefs—appointing design
teams and so on. That will probably be a better use of their time,
given that CDAs work with clients through the project.
Q118 Paul Holmes: The design quality
indicator is online, and it was suggested that any project costing
over £1 million, let alone a whole school, should use it
as a yardstick. Is that being done?
Dr Simmons: DQIs are certainly
very helpful in informing the brief to begin with, but we apply
a slightly different process. Graham is the expert on DQIs, but
as long as they are used properly, carefully and there is feedback
about what they have done, they are a very good way to involve
a wide group of people. You have to use several different ways
of engaging the client, and the key message we are getting is
that where clients—not the LEA, but the people who use the
school—are directly engaged in a conversation with the architects
and contractor, the results are better. Graham is probably in
a better position to comment about DQIs.
Graham Watts: The DQI for schools
is a very simple tool that should enable all the stakeholders
in a school project, including the students and the teaching and
ancillary staff, to be involved in a conversation about what they
expect to achieve—their aspirations for the design quality
of the finished school. That is reviewed at various points in
the process. It is very early days in the programme, and the problem
is that it is seen more as a contractual necessity—a box
to be ticked—rather than a process that is properly facilitated,
involves all the stakeholders and is gone through in a considered
and co-ordinated way. Where it happens, however, we see evidence
that the process is improving the product.
Q119 Paul Holmes: My final question
relates to some of your earlier comments. One or two of you talked
about companies and architects who are a bit worried about going
in for the design process and bid, but not being selected, and
therefore losing money. What is unusual about that? I remember
years ago, as a councillor, having presentations from three teams
of architects and designers who wanted to build the new shopping
precinct in Chesterfield; only one could win and two were not
going to. Why is BSF any different from the usual process?
Sunand Prasad: What is unusual
about the situation, when compared with what you describe, is
the sheer amount of work involved. We are basically designing
whole buildings in considerable detail. We had been doing three
and chucking away two of them; now it will be two and we will
chuck away one. That is one problem, which is why it is so expensive
to bid. It also creates a discontinuity between those early engagements—we
all agree that early preparation, getting your brief right and
getting a good concept design together are essential. If we had
continuity between that and using DQIs to track progress and the
built school, that would be ideal. Currently, however, because
of procurement rules, we have an interruption, whereby the contractors
come in with their own designers and reinvent the wheel to minimise
risk and other sorts of supposed aims. We believe that there are
other ways of doing that and keeping that continuity. My position,
and, in fact RIBA's position, is that that would get over many
of the problems that we are describing—if we could have
that continuity and if those designs could be novated to be constructed.
Chairman: We are going to have to speed
up questions and answers because of our slightly late start. Douglas?
No? John?
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