Future Schools

Innovative Design for Existing and New Buildings

Nick Mirchandani, Sharon Wright, Nick Mirchandani, Sharon Wright

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000701678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Uniquely Future Schools not only provides design guidance on themes in schools architecture and a wealth of recent innovative projects drawn from the UK but also an understanding of the socio-political and economic context that any practice must work within when taking on a schools project. It balances beautiful visuals and innovative case studies with in-depth discussion of the thought processes and issues to consider in good school design. Reflecting on ambitious projects during the BSF period of high investment and post-BSF creativity and innovation during austerity it considers the next phase of school design shaped by growing student numbers, diversity in project types and routes and the growing opportunities for smaller practices as work on existing buildings becomes more common.

1
Past Schools and Future Schools

Sharon Wright

‘A quick sweep of history suggests we find ourselves in a similar position to our predecessors in the postwar era, with the challenges of needing to provide for a rising birth rate and to replenish the increasingly jaded building stock’

Introduction

In 1925 Henry Morris, one of the first of a new breed of local government education officers recruited to oversee an expanding education system, wrote a memorandum setting out his vision for the village college, an all-age provision for Cambridgeshire’s rural communities. He declared that: ‘The child would enter at three and leave the college only at extreme old age’. Part of his vision was to design appropriate buildings which celebrated education, saying: ‘We are in measurable sight, if we use imagination and have administrative courage, of giving to the English countryside a number of fine and worthy public buildings…the difference between good and bad architecture is often the difference between a good design and a bad design, rather than the difference between cheap and costly material’.

Hellerup School, Copenhagen (LOOP. bz/Arkitema Architects, 2002). This largely open-plan new school is arranged over three floors around a wide stairway that doubles up as a gathering place and an auditorium. The project challenged preconceptions regarding educational space and was visited and researched by many of those involved in the Building Schools for the Future programme.

It would seem hard to argue with his logic or his enthusiasm for well-designed schools that catered for lifelong learning. Ten village colleges were completed by the mid-1960s and Morris – keen to involve the best architects of the day – asked Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry to design Impington Village College, which opened in 1939. It is now a Grade I listed building and a school that still serves as a centre for its community.

Despite Morris’ vision and commitment, and his influence on community education in a number of other counties, the village college movement never truly spread outside Cambridgeshire. It was not until much later that architecture and education would be brought together in a systematic way.

In this book we set out to understand how education and design are bound together in the process of developing effective learning environments, and to celebrate instances where it has been successful. In this chapter we review the historical links between education and school design, with a view to learning from the past and avoiding the mistakes of our predecessors.

Education and school design

Throughout the last two centuries it is clear that school design in England has lagged behind social and educational developments, struggling to keep pace with change. This disconnect has often resulted in outdated buildings that are unsuitable for the curriculum they are asked to deliver.

Over the past 15 years however, there have been a number of best practice publications and literature reviews focusing on the sector. It’s important to acknowledge how far we have come in a relatively short time, and as we find ourselves in a new phase of school design, the ability to adapt and reinterpret our knowledge is essential.

The early days

England in the 19th century possessed a disparate education system delivered through voluntary societies with the majority of schools owned and controlled by churches (Green 1990). Government did give some financial support to these societies from 1833, but this amounted to a fraction of the total cost of providing schools. By 1881 there were 14,370 voluntary schools and 3,692 public board schools. This lack of cohesive provision allowed individual philanthropists, such as Robert Owen in New Lanark, to open their own schools to educate communities as they saw fit. The rise of the philanthropists, including Titus Salt in Bradford, the Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight and George and Richard Cadbury in Bourneville, saw industrialists providing housing, schools and other services for their workers. In doing so they controlled most aspects of their employee’s lives, including how education was delivered and the buildings in which it took place. Salt employed local architects Henry Lockwood and Richard Mawson to design his new community, Saltaire, to relocate his workers from the unhealthy environment of industrial Bradford. Between 1851 and 1876 he built a modern mill and an entire village, including a school, all designed by Lockwood and Mawson and inspired by the architecture of the Italian Renaissance.

The Education Acts of 1870 and 1902 saw the introduction of state responsibility for compulsory education. Children were moving out of the factory and into the school, reflecting both a shift in the perceptions about the usefulness of education in society and an increase in mechanisation that released children from manual labour. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the factory model of production was also largely applied to how education was delivered, with large numbers of children packed into one schoolroom.

When the architect ER Robson was appointed to the London School Board in 1872 to deal with the anticipated expansion in pupil numbers, he implemented standardised designs that saw children being moved from large multi-purpose rooms to individual classrooms for 40 to 60 students. He introduced communal halls with classrooms around the edge, was concerned with how the building could support learning through classroom display and teacher presentation space, and also outlined specific details such as the optimum amount of daylight for the classroom (Dudek 2000). Robson’s influence was to spread far beyond London through his writings on school design.

Board School, Blackheath Road, Greenwich, London designed by ER Robson. This is a good example of his early school building, the style of which was considered extremely progressive for the time.

Similar building programmes were taking place in other urban areas such as Birmingham and Sheffield, and some 40 board schools were built in Manchester between 1870 and 1902. In 2006 it was estimated that around 3,400 pre-1919 primary schools were still in use.

The 1888 County Councils Act had established 62 administrative county areas, and in 1902 the counties assumed responsibility for all aspects of education – elementary, secondary, and technical – so introducing local education authorities. Effectively, a two-tier system was put in place as boroughs with the largest populations were given control of elementary and secondary education, while those with small populations controlled elementary education only. This devolution of responsibility meant a closer link, for the first time, between the locality and its education provision, and saw influential local officials such as Henry Morris assuming control over the school estate. This led to new debates about the role of the school within its community and, in the case of the village colleges, whether providing the right environment and services could stop the drift away from rural areas to the industrial towns and cities.

Consolidation and debate

The period between 1915 and 1945 brought considerable consolidation in the education system and saw the beginnings of some experimentation in school design. The 1921 Education Act raised the school leaving age to 14 and there was much debate about the future of education throughout the period. This included a series of influential reports from a government committee chaired by Sir Henry Hadow. In particular, his 1931 report for the Board of Education, The Primary School, acknowledged that: ‘Many experiments have been and are being carried out in the planning of new buildings for primary schools. We understand that the board welcome these various experiments and that the absence of any rigid building regulations has been found, on the whole, advantageous. It is

Village College, Impington, Cambridgeshire. Designed by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry and opened in 1939.

of interest to note that the majority of plans for new schools recently passed by the board provide for single-storey buildings.’

The report recommended that infants should be on the ground floor of primary schools that were over one storey, and that: ‘Sites for new primary schools should be chosen with great care. Such sites should be open and sunny, removed as far as possible from the noise and dust of roads, and sufficiently large to provide hard playgrounds. Sunlight and fresh air are fundamental needs for young children. School buildings should be placed so as to obtain as much sunlight as possible, and should be cross-ventilated’.

The Hadow report highlighted the fact that many schools had poor sanitary provision, called for drinking water to be made available to all, discussed the need for assembly halls that could also be used for dining, and considered the purpose of the school library. Looking at the report, it’s clear that many of the school design issues discussed today were just as relevant in the 1930s: ‘Classrooms should be so furnished that they may be readily adapted for various forms of activity. Many of our witnesses called attention to the fact that desks of antiquated design are still in use in primary schools, especially those in rural areas. The seats in such desks are often either too high or too low, and the space between the seat and the surface for writing is often wrong. There is sometimes no support for the child’s back and the surface of the desk itself slopes unduly and is thus inconvenient for practical work. Ample cupboards which can readily be used for storing (but not for hoarding) should be provided, and there should be a number of shelves easy of access on which books can be kept.’

During this time changes in school design thinking were beginning to bear fruit, with the increase in more affordable single-storey primary schools representing a move away from Robson’s large imposing Victorian board schools, which usually stood at least three storeys high. As well as the Bauhaus influence in Cambridgeshire, there were a number of modernist school designs emerging including those inspired by Dutch architect Willem Dudok (English Heritage 2011).

After the War

It is estimated that around 20% of schools in England and Wales had been badly damaged or destroyed during the second world war (English Heritage 2011). With a rising birth rate, and the 1944 Education Act raising the compulsory school leaving aged to 15, there was a need for a large-scale school building programme. In 1949 the Architects & Buildings Branch of the Ministry of Education was established and began producing guidance (the start of the Building Bulletins) for local education authorities, including on the use of prefabrication for building new schools (Dudek 2000). At central government level, the design of school buildings (previously the domain of the church, individual benefactors or the local area) was startin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Forewords
• About the editors
• Acknowledgements
• Our publishing partners
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 PAST SCHOOLS AND FUTURE SCHOOLS
• CHAPTER 2 GETTING STARTED: Developing the Client Brief
• CHAPTER 3 GETTING STARTED: Understanding School Specifics
• CHAPTER 4 PASSMORES ACADEMY: ‘One Building, One Community, One Purpose’
• CHAPTER 5 THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX: Outdoor Environments
• CHAPTER 6 EXISTING BUILDINGS: Refurbishment, Remodelling & Extension
• CHAPTER 7 INTERIOR DESIGN: Enhancing the Learning Environment
• CHAPTER 8 THINKING LONG TERM: Managing Change
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Design Standards and Guidance
• Appendix 2 Funding, Area Allowances and ‘Baseline’ Designs
• Further Reading and Resources
• Designer Credits
• Index