Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-129)
IAN FORDHAM,
SUNAND PRASAD,
DR RICHARD
SIMMONS AND
GRAHAM WATTS
OBE
21 JANUARY 2009
Q120 Mr Heppell: Personalised
learning is often talked about, but people have different views
of what it is. What are you doing to ensure that schools can cater
more for personalised learning? I presume that there will be more
one-to-one tuition. How has that affected the way that you design
schools?
Ian Fordham: There is mixed press
on the meaning of personalised learning. The Committee will be
aware of some of the concerns and issues. At a school level, it
is transforming the way teachers think, not only about classroom
teaching but about how they organise themselves in different spaces
and how young people learn outside the curriculum. The work of
David Hargreaves on clustering the gateways to personalised learning—"the
four deeps" as he calls them—is being embedded substantially
in the curriculum. It goes back to design and pedagogy: how the
design of new school buildings integrates into changing thinking
about teaching and learning and the different spaces within which
that can be done. The evaluation highlights that there is still
a gap between design and personalised learning. Engagement with
teachers is critical. To build on the learning we have in that
regard, we ran a series of transformational learning master-classes
just before Christmas with Dr Kenn Fisher, a world expert on pedagogy
and space. He has been inspirational in the work on personalised
learning and new builds in primary schools. The learning that
is taking place and that has been going on at school level on
personalised learning—
Chairman: Usually in the corridor.
Ian Fordham: It is sometimes done
in the corridor, but those things are connected. We must consider
the dynamic that there is not just classroom teaching, but that
learning takes place outside the classroom.
Chairman: Does anybody else want to come
in on personalised learning?
Sunand Prasad: There is much to
be learned from the primary sector, where personalised learning—the
idea that each child has his or her way of dealing with the world
and learning about it—is well established and tracked. The
primary sector allows spaces to be flexible tools that teachers
can use. That is how we must look at them. The school community,
head teachers and teachers must be able to use and manipulate
the space around them to suit learning styles. That must come
from teachers. The key is adaptable and flexible spaces. That
is where the focus is and some good examples are emerging.
Q121 Mr Heppell: Moving on from
that, my colleague from Nottingham, South is always very concerned
that most schools are not very environmentally friendly. There
is talk of schools being zero-carbon by 2016. My experience is
that people talk the talk well. As a quick anecdote, on a visit
to Nottingham University I was shown marvellous technological
innovations for making an environmental impact. There were many
marvellous new inventions. I asked how many were used on the university
premises and the answer was none. There were great ideas, but
they were not being used. What has been learned from the first
wave about making schools sustainable in terms of energy, carbon
emissions and so on? How has that changed the design for what
is coming?
Dr Simmons: Probably, what we
have learned from the first wave is that there is not a lot to
learn from the first wave, other than that the more IT equipment
you put in a school, the hotter it gets. You can undermine a lot
of the good design work if you do not design the building to be
flexible enough to accommodate lots of kit. There is lots of equipment
around—in the jargon—such as "thin clients",
which will reduce the heat output of IT equipment. The first learning
point is to think about the school as a whole, including how it
will operate and what will be in it. There are some simple things
we can learn from the better schools—to be fair, we can
learn from some schools from the first wave. We can also learn
from what has happened in mainland Europe in schools in Scandinavia
and Germany. It is simple stuff. Before you start putting in all
the kit, you should point the building in the right direction
so it takes maximum advantage of sunlight. You should also make
sure that you use daylight as much as possible, so that you are
not spending money using electricity to light the building. You
should use natural ventilation where you can and get the air to
flow through the building in ways that are really quite traditional.
When you are doing that, you should think about how to make sure
that the place does not get too hot or cold, as I said. You can
then start to look at whether you need to add bits of kit. We
have seen quite a few schemes with a windmill, which is actually
there for educational purposes.
Chairman: We have never seen a windmill
that works.
Dr Simmons: That is why they are
there for educational purposes. We would like to see every school
starting from those basic points. I think our basic points are
good architecture, really.
Sunand Prasad: Yes, it is amazing
to hear the obvious and simple things that we have learned from
the first wave. What we have really learned from the first wave
is that setting targets for on-site renewables, for example, is
not necessarily the best way to encourage low carbon. The best
thing to do is to set carbon targets and say that you can achieve
them in the way you want. If you want to achieve it through reducing
your energy use or rescheduling your use of the building, do it
that way, but make sure that you are conscious of what the true
energy costs are. The second thing we have learned is that it
costs money to put these measures in place, and when we still
have a big problem with the costs of these buildings, those measures
get chopped out—even though people start with good intentions.
My firm is supposedly expert in sustainable design, but even though
we have done a number of schools, they are not all exemplars of
sustainable design because the money was not there to do it. Now
that the Government have made the money available, we hope that
there will be a generation of far higher performance schools coming
through. We particularly request that we do not have prescriptive
targets that tell you how to do something, but, by all means,
set outcomes in terms of carbon energy reductions.
Dr Simmons: Could I add briefly
to that? The same issue applies in housing. Last Friday, I was
at a school on a brand new housing estate where the houses are
supposed to achieve certain standards within the red line around
each house, and the school is supposed to achieve certain standards
in the red line around the school. It would have been much more
sensible if sustainability had been looked at across the whole
estate including the school. I hope that the Government are moving
towards—they need to move towards—the idea of looking
at neighbourhoods and larger areas when it comes to energy efficiency
and sustainability. That way you can obtain enough investment
to get the right kit to make sure that you get sustainable energy.
Q122 Chairman: I hope that you
are talking to the Homes and Community Agency.
Dr Simmons: Absolutely.
Q123 Mr Heppell: That just seems
a nice point at which to move on. There is a lot of talk about
joint services and things being run in schools from one location—people
being able to access health care and education there—and
opening up schools to the community generally, so that their facilities
can be used. That conflicts a bit with the heightened security
that I tend to find in schools—getting into some schools
is almost like getting into Fort Knox. How do you design a school
to allow local access and at the same time keep a grip on security?
Sunand Prasad: If you go to the
Jo Richardson Community School in Barking and Dagenham, you will
see how those problems have been solved. Ian is really the person
to address the issue of co-location because he has given a lot
of thought to it.
Ian Fordham: Very briefly, the
key issues are at different levels. Locally, particularly with
the extended schools agenda, a huge amount of work is going on
in terms of integrating services and providing a core of services
outside the curriculum. We think that the "Designing Schools
for Extended Services" work that was done a couple of years
ago needs to be revisited because so much has changed in that
time. A further thing is that if the DCSF is committing £200
million to a co-location fund, which talks about integrating services
in a local area, a proportion of that needs to be used to look
at the issues around design and construction.
Mr Heppell: One last thing—
Q124 Chairman: Before you do that
one last thing, John, I went to Almondbury High School in my constituency
recently. Yes, there are services, but it is a PFI school, and
although the community desperately needs staff working in youth
services in the evening, PFI does not allow that. You can pay
to go in the gym and do health stuff if you are a paying customer,
but young people in that community do not have access because
of PFI. Does that generally happen now? Is it the case that every
PFI school cannot serve the community because the PFI people do
not want expensive security problems at night?
Ian Fordham: There are ways around
that, Chairman. I must confess an interest: I did a piece of work
on PFI and extended schools last year and we were looking for
examples of good practice. There are ways of varying the contracts.
Part of the issue is to have a master plan to see how activities
for young people can be built into the system in an effective
way. Having that integrated approach from a school's perspective
means that the contractor can collaborate and look at that space
outside school hours. A number of contractors have been quite
active in this and have set up community interest companies and
so on to manage those facilities outside school hours in a PFI
contract.
Q125 Mr Heppell: The National
Deaf Children's Society provides anecdotal evidence that many
deaf children who are being taught in mainstream schools find
it very difficult because the new schools that are being built
have bad acoustical problems. As someone who has a hearing problem,
I can understand the difficulty. You can go in one room and you
can pick up someone talking quite easily, yet in another room
you cannot hear a word. How strong are you on building the acoustics
of a building into the design?
Chairman: We have all met NDCS on this.
Sunand Prasad: There is a strong
building bulletin on acoustics in schools which, if followed,
would answer those questions. One of the issues is that some of
these changing and emerging pedagogies and these flexible spaces
are about open plan, so there is a direct conflict between acoustics
and a pedagogic move towards more open plan and more flexible
learning. Again, there are good examples of where that has been
solved, but it is one of those areas that is a real design challenge.
How do you balance those two and how do you take care of the needs
of people with partial hearing, while allowing open plan? Without
going into the details of the cases, it would be difficult to
comment, but overall good codes, good practice and Building Bulletin
93 are available to deal with that, and some of that conflict
might arise because of an internal issue about pedagogy.
Ian Fordham: The BCSE is grabbing
this issue pretty strongly in the next month. We are having an
expert session on the guidance in BB93 on acoustics. We are getting
these issues out into the open. The current building standards
for schools mean that less than 40 per cent. of speech is intelligible
for some children with a hearing impairment. The title of the
report says it all: "Must Do Better". How can we get
that information out into the system very quickly and avoid those
obvious issues?
Chairman: Sadly, we are running out of
time. Let us have a quick one from John to finish and then Andy
or anyone else may have a quick one before we change panels.
Mr Heppell: I was just going to say that
it often seems to me that the design of the room is right, but
people have not taken background noises into account. You will
be in a room and it will be fine and then they will switch the
air conditioning on and they might as well have turned on a band
as far as I am concerned. I have lost all conversation. I suspect
that many deaf children are in that position.
Q126 Mr Stuart: Basically, the
major environmental aspects which are brought in by specialists
in that are being taken out at the last minute because of the
capital cost element. Have any positive changes been made to incentivise
their introduction? I have heard from pump manufacturers that
at that last minute the category A pump specifications are taken
out, which has a transformational effect on the amount of carbon
produced by the building over its life cycle. This is an issue
not just for those with a hearing problem, but for those with
a concentration problem who are the most vulnerable and the most
likely to end up as NEETs. I know from being a governor of a school
where I had to work for years to get the open plan classrooms
closed off again that ensuring that such children could hear is
pretty essential too. Can you respond to those two points?
Sunand Prasad: On the first point,
again when we describe those sustainability measures that were
taken out we are looking at a previous regime. You are talking
about before the money was made available—up to £500,000
per school—precisely to do this. That is great news.
Q127 Mr Stuart: So they will all
be category A pumps in every school from now? Can I be absolutely
confident about that?
Sunand Prasad: I wish I could
go out and mandate that right now.
Mr Stuart: I wish you could too.
Sunand Prasad: Again, let us stick
to outcomes. Rather than category A pumps, are we getting energy
or carbon reductions? That is what the target for that extra investment
is. We should see that coming through and that money being spent.
On acoustics, there is always some learning. I do not think that
anybody fully understood what the impact of open plan schools
would be when the first ones were built.
Q128 Mr Stuart: That change is
25 years old, and I would have thought that we would have learned,
25 years on, and in a multi-billion pound specified programme,
not to have open plan classes in which kids with hearing difficulties,
for example, or those who have been alienated from school, cannot
hear the teacher if they are more than 3 ft away.
Sunand Prasad: That would be bad
design, and there may be some examples of it, but I could show
you plenty of examples of open plan that actually works.
Dr Simmons: I guess that you are
really talking about the whole point of the programme, which is
the young people who are going to be learning in the school. Something
as basic as the Disability Discrimination Acts require that you
consider the needs of disabled people first. The process needs
to do it: it is that simple. The question then is how you achieve
a number of different objectives. Personalised learning has many
dimensions, one of which is ensuring that particular needs are
met. It needs to be clear in the briefing process that those needs
are critical and that they need to be put first. In our experience,
the private sector is very good at solving problems if you ask
it the right question, so you need to ensure that those questions
are right up front in the briefing process.
Q129 Chairman: We do not underestimate
the complexity of the matter. I have recently been to some schools
where I was absolutely enthused about the new ways of teaching
and learning through IT. The BETT exhibition—it is the biggest
educational technology exhibition in the world—opened up
many new ways of learning that I am enthusiastic about. I have
visited two schools in Warrington that are piloting small computers
that children take home, run around the school with and use in
open space. The head said to me: "If you are building a school
with a computer suite now, you are out of date." What do
you think about that?
Sunand Prasad: I agree: IT is
changing dramatically. There is an idea that IT should be ubiquitous—that,
wherever you are, you have access to IT and that it is not fixed
to a building and plant and so on. That is the direction for the
future. IT will enable different ways of using space.
Dr Simmons: It depends on your
educational vision. That type of IT will allow more personalised
learning, and it will reduce the heat load on the school, because
such devices produce less heat. However, I was at a school that
is bidding to be an arts college last week. It has put a suite
of Macintosh computers in because it wants to do fairly complex
graphics and design work. At the moment, you probably would not
risk people running around schools with Macintosh laptops. It
depends what you are trying to achieve, and you have got to have
a bit of flexibility.
Chairman: I was trying to illustrate
the complexity and imagining the struggle for a deaf child, which
may be different. That was fantastic. Will you remain in contact,
because this matter is of ongoing interest to the Committee? Also,
we are minded to go out and have a look at things again. When
we go out, we need a cluster, and we are quite happy to go out
to someone's constituency to see interesting things there. We
would hold a formal session outside so that we can really get
through to the people who are using a school, and we might even
do it in Harwich. Thank you very much.
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