BFE UK blog

Welcome to the Building Future Education (BFE) UK blog. Hear the thoughts from Matt Pennell, former writer from the Building Schools Journal, and other leading experts from the construction and educations sectors.

[bfeuk-blog]

“In life you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate” Don King, 1992

Why start a building schools blog off with a quote from a boxing promoter? Bear with me, this one refers to scams and sharp practice, and the filthiest and most colourful sport seems a good place to start. Boxing is full of calculating and clever individuals, who often bend and break rules with impunity – only two people have been convicted of fixing boxing bouts in the last 50 years – that’s the same number as for cricket. Nowadays schools, especially autonomous ones, have a large number of relationships with suppliers. Unlike with supply chains and the construction industry these relationships can be anything but cosy, and the potential pitfalls of using a bad operator were highlighted at the start of the year by this story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16441186 All credit to Glemsford Primary School for fronting up about this situation, it takes a lot of bravery to admit to being fleeced like this. Needless to say, this wouldn’t have happened if the schools affected had picked a firm from a BECTA framework (many are still in effect even though the organisation is no more). When BECTA was dissolved tributes didn’t exactly flood in – it’s easy to critique the framework method, it favours big firms and can create cartels. Honest SMEs, unlike the one mentioned in the above article, now have a much better chance of supplying to schools, which is a good thing. Are the safeguards against bad operators sufficient, however? Primary schools especially are vulnerable on the ICT front, with fewer dedicated ICT staff and teachers that are ill-equipped to negotiate good supply deals. Many of BECTA’s responsibilities are being taken in-house by the DfE and a new set of frameworks is being implemented by the dept. – most of the firms on it will be familiar to ICT managers, at the very least let’s hope this restores order and honesty to the marketplace. The intensive use of ICT throws up challenges for schools and for design and build teams. When embarking on a newbuild or a major refurb getting the ICT provision exactly right is difficult, requiring a lot of expertise and foresight. Step one, the widespread use of ICT needs to written into the building services spec of the project plan. Step two, the classroom environment needs to be designed in such a way to anticipate technological changes over the operational life of the building. Anyone know what ICT we’ll be using in 10, 20 or 50 years time? No? Me neither. Having that level of foresight is just impossible, I suppose the best you can hope for is to enable a building for the use of today’s technology, and make spaces flexible enough so they can be adapted to unforeseeable changes in 10 – 15 years time. Beyond getting the building design right, there are questions about the optimum use of ICT – you need to consider that major spends on buying ICT hardware and software, then operating machines take away from the rest of your budget. What are you achieving with ICT exactly? Evidence that ICT use alone boosts attainment in schools is scant – so this is highly debatable. One thing that isn’t debatable is that the ICT-rich environment in Britain’s schools hasn’t led on to a number of tech champions in the real world. There’s no British equivalent of Google, IBM, CISCO, Dell, Apple, Acer, or Microsoft. Perhaps the mooted changes to the ICT curriculum will address this. The previous government tried hard to effect a transformational change and yet ICT in schools is seen as being boring and basic. We simply won’t compete with China and India if all we have is Generation Y kids being particularly adept at doing a mail merge. ICT in certain schools is so ubiquitous that wifi points exist in PE changing rooms – not exactly the best place to learn how to do C++ or Javascript coding. So what do we need going forward? A better curriculum – let’s hope that’s now being taken care of. Better ICT enabled classrooms – still a problem and one that the DfE Technology Policy Unit needs to get to grips with. And lastly the efficient use of ICT in schools – no dogmatic splurge, schools should be smart and well-informed about what their needs should be and should not overuse ICT. Getting the right spec and using hardware the right amount should free up money which is vital in the current funding environment.

[bfeuk-blog]

Building Future Education UK - find out what it's all about

[bfeuk-blog]

A case of the killer Ds

The philosophy behind school buildings development underwent a seismic shift when power changed hands in 2010. Out went the admirable but fuzzy ideals of education transformation, and in came pragmatism. Building projects will now deal with the two Ds – dilapidation and demand. This is a change in focus to dealing with the very worst buildings (though not necessarily the worst schools by exam results), and the simple legal requirement of providing a school place for every child that needs one. 

School building projects tend to lead to another two Ds – delays and disruption. The high profile Priority Schools Building Programme has slipped from its original timetable as the DfE mulls over the last cases to be included in the first tranche of 100 schools. Compared to the programme that PSBP is replacing, BSF, the time lag is a blink of an eye. I’m sure there are many school buildings professionals reading this that recall the two-year bidding process and six-month contract negotiations that followed. BSF could be a long and exhausting process (and very unrewarding if you didn’t win), even before you started any construction work.  

There are two things one hopes will happen for the rest of 2012. Firstly that these delays aren’t significant – the construction industry needs these projects to start promptly. The government has a solid infrastructure pipeline now in place but much of it begins in 2013 or beyond. Secondly it would be great if the extra time spent on the preparatory stages of the PSBP is spent wisely. The choice of schools for PSBP will be based on a property survey providing the first set of nationwide data on school buildings since 2005. It’s a very big ask to survey several thousand schools, categorise them, and then begin work on them straight away. Rebuilding the worst schools is common sense, however even relatively new and superficially sound schools estates can throw up hidden dangers. A regional contractor working on an SEN school close UBM’s North Kent office was stung badly by defective gas and water pipes that required substantial remedial work – the contractor didn’t survive this unexpected delay. The school in question first opened in 1983. 

PSBP throws up a few posers – project teams will know they’re working on appalling buildings, but how many unexpected and costly problems will appear onsite? Furthermore, how will the risk of cost overruns be factored into PFI contracts? PSBP aspires to rebuild substantial parts of old schools for only £20m when many new City Academies have been costing around £30 – 35m. It’s often said that around half of all building projects finish up being delivered late and overbudget. It’s going to take phenomenal project management and cost control skills for PSBP to meet the industry average. 

The money side of things is important, obviously, but time matters to schools too. The school year involves fixed dates and a few weeks of delays can eat into term time. During the Labour years councils were keen on estate rationalisation and reorganisation – some astounding decisions were made pursuing this approach. One dubious project involved decanting three primary schools into one large newbuild. Progress on the project was inhibited by the absence of a head who was on long-term sick leave, Supply teachers came and went at a school where the classes didn’t even have names. Pupils got to experience a building site for 18 months with no sense of belonging or purpose behind the project. Minimising disruption on site should be a priority for design & build teams, and change management should be a priority for the client. Both of these should feature prominently in project briefs as PSBP throws up major challenges for all schools taking part.

[bfeuk-blog]

Senses working overtime

I was always a sceptic of the notion that external stimuli could affect the behaviour of people in a state of agitation until I read about Snow Patrol. Apparently landlords in Glasgow use this song to distract drunken yoboiks and break up fights:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOBs8dU4Pb8&ob=av2n

The anthemic qualities of the chorus are enough to stop people smashing bottles over each others heads. If music can pacify drunken adults, what are the chances of the right sights, sounds, smells, textures having a positive influence on the behaviour of pupils in the classroom? Even in the best performing schools teachers have to spend some time engaging in ‘crowd control’ rather than disseminating information. Boisterous and disruptive pupils are a fact of school life but can their instincts be minimised or transformed?

Certain members of the design & build community believe it can. A lot of research has been put into sensory perception by architecture practices that can be applied to the classroom. Many fundamentals such as acoustics, temperature, lighting and air quality have been micro analysed. One startling fact is that the audibility of speech delivered in a normal conversational style starts to break up at a distance of nine metres. Nearly every teacher has to project far more than nine metres to the back of the classroom, as a result most lose their voice in the first month on the job.

Architects that are dedicated to school building have been talking about effective classroom environments for a long time. We’ve fallen short of delivering great classrooms for many reasons – a lot of schools aren’t designed by dedicated specialists, the need to adhere to Building Bulletins has created the belief that classrooms can’t be changed or improved, delivering ‘optimum’ lighting, heating, ventilation and acoustics is seen as prohibitively expensive. There’s just a few – you can probably think of more.

The aspiration to build better classrooms remains, however, and this is the motivation behind the BCSE’s Decent School Standard campaign. The campaign endeavours to re-assert the case for better classroom design – citing the benchmarks for temperature, lighting and acoustics, and what the potential is for raising attainment when all the barriers of a poor environment are removed. Hopefully this will educate the wider design & build community and schools clients about the real practicalities of classroom design. With staff cutbacks at local authorities, new and inexperienced clients (hello Free Schools and converted Academies), and changes to the role and remit of enabling or delivery bodies (such as Design Council CABE and PfS) this help and guidance is needed more than ever. We wish the BCSE the best of luck with this campaign. If you’re reading this you’re already committed to building schools so pass the message on to those that really to learn more about building better classrooms.

[bfeuk-blog]

Birth of a nation

As we enter 2012 there are so many opportunities and policy changes just starting to make an impact on the building schools landscape. One major development in the sector has come in under the radar and will have a greater short term impact than Priority Schools, Academy conversions or Free Schools. Last year the DfE announced £1.1Bn worth of Basic Need funding. The premise of this funding is pretty vague but industry experts are predicting this will be mostly directed towards primary school projects. In theory that’s enough money to construct around 250 newbuild primary schools, though in this age of refurbishment and remodelling it will be spread over far more.

Basic Need money is likely to be channelled towards the primary sector for two reasons – 1) The cancellation of the Primary Capital Programme, which had barely got past the pilot stage left an echoey void in funding for this sector and 2) The birthrate bounce has created the need for several thousand new school places. Reports have varied on just how many new places are needed – the ONS figures show that the birthrate increased from 596,000 in 2002 to 708,000 in 2008. While it’s difficult to obtain precise age-group figures on net migration it’s safe to say that this is affecting demand for places too and a conservative estimate here is around 10,000 – 15,000 a year. Overall, more than 500,000 extra places are required for primary school children compared to the early years of the millennium.

Beyond the national statistics there are local trends that are creating infrastructure bottlenecks – more families with young children are opting to stay in city centre locations where historically they’d move to suburban and rural billets. The need for more places is therefore acute in big cities. Though the rationale for Free Schools is not to deliver quick-win capacity increases, the conversion of existing buildings means they’re handily placed to do this. So far the DfE has gone about halfway to addressing the challenge posed by the baby boom – the new money allocated for capacity increases is intended to deliver 40,000 new school places annually – the actual need is closer to 100,000.

There’s a number of options on the table to fill the gap – a continued expansion of the Basic Need funding route, greater use of Free Schools style building conversion, increasing use of mobile/temporary classrooms – or an option rarely considered so far – conversion of unused space in undersubscribed secondary schools. This pressing need for new capacity will create a decent pipeline of work for the construction industry, including SMEs locked out of large scale PFI schemes, and for the property industry, hitherto not engaged in the state school sector. Once again at the start of a new era, new operators are entering the building schools marketplace. We wish them luck and hope for a positive outcome as they get to grips with a new set of challenges.

To become a guest columnist on behalf of BFE UK, please email me on [email protected] or submit a request on the right hand side.

[bfeuk-blog]

The new building blocks of education

Hello and welcome to the Building Future Education (BFE) UK blog. This is the first in a series of columns covering all things to do with the building schools marketplace. To the eagle-eyed among you this will have a familiar look – the magazine Building Schools Journal was launched in 2005 as an accompaniment to the Building Schools Exhibition and Conference, which began in Harrogate in 2006. I was lucky enough to edit the magazine at an exciting time - new money, lots of optimism and new thinking transformed the sector. Six years on and there are many parallels, late-2011 feels like a new era for building schools – there’s been a plethora of new funding announcements, culminating in the Autumn statement, and several new types of school now on the drawing board. Under the last Labour Government there was an attempt to ramp up school building activity and modernise teaching methods under the banner of ‘transforming the learning environment’. The whole BSF programme was dependent on a period of long term political stability and enduring prosperity. Unsurprisingly the wheels came off pretty quickly. Now programmes have a shorter time frame and have more pragmatic aims – the two watchwords for Priority Schools are dilapidation and demand. Some new building schemes, such as Studio Schools and UTCs, still involve innovation in the curriculum, however. City Academies have evolved from aspiring to churn out a nation of mini-Alan Sugars to offering some genuinely interesting specialisms. As with BSF before, the intentions behind the policy can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, and the jury is out. Building a school remains a complex process, so design and build teams really need to pay attention to the nuances in policy, detailed client briefs and the priorities of a range of stakeholders. The BFE website (www.bfeuk.com) and event, are here to help you through what is shaping up to be another exciting time, rich with opportunities and possibilities for those who are set to build new schools for our country’s children. To become a guest columnist on behalf of BFE UK, please email me on [email protected] or submit a request on the right hand side.