Schools without walls

Architect and Building Schools for the Future (BSF) Design Champion Derek Latham asks whether the large campus-style schools being developed through the BSF programme are always the best way of serving the needs of learners, teachers and their wider communities.

The aim of the Government's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme is not only to better educate our children, but to use learning as a tool for the regeneration of the communities in which the children live. Since 2003 the intention has been to deliver this regeneration through Extended Schools – schools which are able to provide a range of services and activities, often beyond the traditional school day, to help meet the needs of children, their families and the wider community.

However,  what very quickly strikes anyone looking at current plans is just how many of these schools for the future  are not in fact located in the disadvantaged inner city communities. Instead they can be found in the leafier and more spacious environment of adjacent suburbs. 

This is a model we have got very used to in recent years. By their very nature, these schools usually serve a wide catchment area, including a broad range of different communities.  These communities are usually complex and multi layered, often representing different religions, cultures and behavioural norms.  They may have distinct physical boundaries such as railway lines, rivers or industrial estates.  Across these physical boundaries may be communities with very different characteristics.  And yet most urban school catchment areas ignore them completely, working on a strictly geographic and numerical basis, organising the number of pupils without any consideration of the boundaries of their communities. 

As long as education continues to be delivered in a traditionally didactic format, primarily dependent upon an individual’s response and reaction to predetermined methods of teaching and learning within a minimum school day, the implications of crossing community boundaries may be more logistical than educational – more about transport, dietary requirements and segregation in sport than the deeper implications for learning.

But there are two factors which suggest a change of view (and model) may be necessary.

First, if we are serious about using education to support community regeneration, it is important that these new BSF Extended Schools address the specific needs of the close knit, often multi-ethnic, lower socio economic group communities in inner urban areas or on ‘sink estates’.  It is when these communities are vulnerable to issues of multiple deprivation or immigration or social alienation, that the need for a school to relate to and reach out into the community is at its highest. 

And second, as learning philosophies move towards managing each young person’s learning development through a personalised curricula, the need to match the school with the community increases.  As extended learning increases education beyond the minimum school day, the need to involve the young learners’ family, friends, and colleagues also increases.  The school that is rooted into its community background is more likely to achieve this than a school which is located away from them in the suburbs and which serves a wider range of communities. 

The DfES's (now DCSF) own Extended Schools report in 2006 said that where a school has facilities suitable for use by the wider community (e.g. playing fields, sports facilities, IT facilities), it should look to open these up to meet wider community needs in response to an assessment of local demand. But how does it do this if it is not located within the community in most need of those facilities? How can a school be sustainable, however carefully it is constructed, if most pupils, parents and community participants have to drive or bus their way to school rather than walk or cycle?

Small is beautiful

Is the answer ,then, to create schools that are physically located within their communities, each appropriate in scale to the size of the community? Is this the model by which we can increase the ability of that school to support learners and help with the regeneration of the whole area and its community?

Well, it is possible that that is one answer. But sites within these densely developed urban areas are likely to be difficult to find. After all, that is why schools were frequently moved from their original Victorian sites to the more spacious surroundings of the suburbs in the first place.

Instead, rather than looking for a large site on which to house a single-site school within these communities, perhaps we might consider a new model for our schools, one where the school would be co-located across several sites. 

So how could this work? Well, if a community could support a three form entry school then this might be located on four sites – three sites each having a one form entry, and creating a “stage not age” small school group of learning. Most learning for years 7, 8 and 9 would occur on these three sites, along with perhaps half the learning for years 10 and 11 and an element of post 16 learning and adult learning on certain times and days. 

The fourth site could then accommodate specialist accommodation for sports, drama performance, specialised science and technology and engineering, to which all pupils would have access for the other part of their learning.  Alternatively it could be that these core facilities were shared around the other sites as might be suited by the size and scale of the sites or the buildings that they occupy.  For instance, a school site adjacent to an industrial area might be used for one form of entry plus the community school’s wider design technology and engineering teaching.

Effectively this would see community schools become a series of small schools linked together, a model sometimes referred to as “a school within a school” – although in this case each small school within the big school would be spatially dispersed, giving each a clear identity and a better ability to serve a particular need or section of community. 

There is much evidence from America and the Antipodes to show that truancy decreases in small schools where people of all ages know each other, and where they learn together by teaching and helping each other. In addition, there is real evidence that their attention span increases, with consequent improvements in both academic and social results. If this impetus is then supported by facilities and opportunities within the wider school that the young learner can expand into for certain areas of learning as they mature, then pupils can learn how to engage with the wider community at their own pace.  Just as importantly, those with special or individual needs can then be better supported within their own protected community, with support from specialists serving the whole group of small schools.

The small schools, and the larger schools to which they belong, could then cater not only just for young learners, but for people of all ages – perhaps the families of those recently arrived in Britain who are struggling with the language and bewildered by the culture; or those out of work and looking to acquire new skills; or simply those wishing to improve their generic skills on ICT to improve their chances of promotion or their quality of life.  Where the needs of the community warrant it, one could easily imagine such a school running 16/7 – that is 16 hours a day, seven days a week, providing a genuine place for community activity – learning and social.

Addressing Fears

In recent years, the ability to deliver any kind of a model for community-inclusive schools has been hampered by the need for stringent security measures.  Public fear, and at times hysteria, whether focusing on insane gunmen or paedophiles and kidnappers, has led to a policy of reducing risk by keeping young learners separated by railings or locked doors from others in their community. 

But does this make any sense? Outside of school hours and outside the school grounds, youngsters take their chance in the wider world as they always have, relying as we all do on the police and the wider community to protect them against crime.  Gun crime in schools is still incredibly rare in this country, and all the evidence is that youngsters are much more vulnerable to abuse and assault in their own homes than anywhere else in the community.  In this context, what is needed is not an encampment policy within a school but simply one of heightened security awareness,

We need to help young learners (and those adults who learn alongside them) by creating secure regimes which are simply a heightened reflection of that which exists in the wider community.  All members of the school community can share the responsibility of challenging anyone without appropriate identity, CCTV cameras can monitor any areas of potential risk, and metal detectors can be deployed if necessary.  Each child can be equipped with their own biometric secure learning device, which itself can act as a security tool, complete with an alarm mechanism indicating whether they are in danger, or simply feeling insecure and worried about a particular situation.

By adopting this more realistic approach to security, the freedom to learn out of school, and out of normal school hours, would be greatly enhanced. Learners could earn the right to flexible learning not on ability but upon application – the way in which they apply themselves to tasks.  This approach would also open the door to more vocational learning, with courses taking place in the local hairdressers, TA Centre, car repair workshops, catering establishments, health centre, library or even on the allotments.  An education format that rewards a desire to learn and nurtures a sense of responsibility is surely more likely to encourage good citizenry than a series of lectures.

The future?

A small, locally-based “school without walls” would help young learners to develop through learning in a protective community environment, moving naturally into a wider range of learning in the wider urban environment as they mature.  By breaking down the barriers between being “in” school and “out” of school, we can also reduce or even remove the feeling of ‘threshold’ which deters many older citizens from restarting their learning (a reluctance which is almost invariably the result of not enjoying school when young).  In addition, it is a model which would surely serve better the needs of minority groups such as EOTAS – Education other than at school (anxious or phobic pupils or pupils with illness etc) - or provide discreet and supportive accommodation for pregnant girls and/or single mums. Certainly most dedicated Special Schools already demonstrate that vulnerable children and young people prefer to be at such a school rather than at home, as long as it is within a small school environment.

By providing all of these benefits, together with extended PRU facilities,  a “nurturing breakfast” (particularly for those from dysfunctional homes) and  a “linking tea” (to create continuity between school and evening activities - youth club, sport, drama, performance, engineering or IT clubs and adult learning), the “school without walls” will be well placed to fulfil its role in supporting community regeneration through education.

Meanwhile of course, the current BSF programme remains focused on providing large campus-style schools, modelled on the concept of the campus-style universities of the 1960s and 70s.  But it may well be that in the recent history of universities we can find the examples we need to guide us as we consider the future of our schools.

With the elevation of many erstwhile Polytechnics / Technology Colleges to university status in the 90s, we saw how many of these institutions became much better integrated into the urban fabric than those campus universities set up two or more decades earlier. With less differentiation between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ they encouraged a much increased take-up of learning by the local population.  It was certainly not a new model of course - the original universities of Oxford and Cambridge comprised a group of small Colleges ‘woven’ into their historic surrounds.  Paradoxically in the case of Oxford, the newer university, Oxford Brookes, is on a suburban campus. 

The question for us now as we consider the educational needs of each of our communities is  which model will suit each particular community - ‘Oxford A’ (collegiate) or ‘Oxford B’ (campus)?  Both arrangements create suitable places to learn, but some are better suited to particular communities than others. 

At the moment BSF appears geared to the perpetuation of just one model –  ‘Oxford B’ (campus). Whether this is through the adoption of existing education authority sectors and school sites, or because it is easier to develop this way, or simply because the larger the better (and quicker) to achieve the whole BSF task – well, that is difficult to say.

But whatever the reason, it seems that one key issue has been overlooked in the current BSF process – the fact that for some communities, including many of our most vulnerable, disadvantaged and in-need communities, smaller may definitely be more beautiful.

 

About the Author
Derek Latham, founder and chairman of Lathams, is an architect, townplanner and landscape architect specialising in education and regeneration. During the last two decades he  has advised more than 100 Grant Maintained, Voluntary Aided and Community Schools on masterplanning and development strategies – as well as winning the funding and building out the vision for many of these schools. Derek is a CABE Education Enabler, an RIBA Client Design Advisor, and the Design Champion for five current BSF bids. Derek is also Chair of REM (Regeneration East Midlands) the regional centre of excellence