College and school design issues

College and school design issues

Last year I put out a request for information about things going wrong when it comes to new school design. We often hear about the successes, but we can also learn much from people's mistakes.

Thanks to everyone who responded. As you’d expect, not many people were able to officially report on any failures, but the common causes of problems seem to be the following:

· An emphasis on the technology rather than the learning. So you have some fantastic “stuff” that doesn’t allow the school to work the way it wants to.

· Failure of architects to engage with the educationalists at an early enough stage, so that technical considerations, like the need for some cabling perhaps, get considered too late.

· Lack of vision, where the Headteacher and the senior management team just cannot think out of the box. And actually, why should they be able to? Unless it’s a job requirement for all school leaders to be innovative and visionary, which it isn’t.

· Too much vision. Left to themselves, architects and others get carried away with their own delusions of grandeur. Having open and elevated areas, for example, is pretty dangerous: even if a child doesn’t plummet to their death, someone is bound to injure someone by throwing something over the ledge. And what about the school I heard about where the floors (including the stairs) are made of glass? Did anyone bother to ask the female students what they thought about that?

· Lack of funding for sustainability. Technology goes wrong. That is a fact. So what you need is a good technical support service that will prevent most mishaps and sort the ones that do occur quickly and seamlessly. But if there is no money for technical support, it’s just a matter of time before the vision turns into a bad dream.

I don’t think there is anything that is rocket science about any of this, but it’s nice to have one’s suspicions confirmed from real-life examples. Actually, I take that back: it would have been even nicer to have found out that my slightly sceptical attitude was completely wrong.

A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Computers in Classrooms.