What if we could build schools in a much more cost efficient way, making them highly adaptive to change, supporting our learners and staff better pastorally, and could be a closer part of our community? Perhaps the opportunity of the credit crunch is to make some radical changes in how we think about building new schools. Tom Weaver looks at how to practically make it happen.
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Within the first weeks of October 2008, every day brought a new sense of turmoil to the global credit crisis. The US senate voted on a historic bail-out plan, banks went bust left, right and centre, Iceland’s economy self-imploded and panic gripped markets everywhere.
The credit crunch was finally biting in earnest, as though everything that had gone before it, with the fall of Northern Rock and the demise of Lehman Brothers, was merely foreshocks to the earthquake.
Yet the symptoms had been brewing all summer, and one major consequence has been the sudden tie-up of private sector funding needed to close a number of Building Schools for the Future deals.
For the uninitiated, Building Schools for the Future mainly relies on Private Finance Initiative (PFI) monies. This essentially acts like a super sized mortgage: a private sector consortium bidding to design, build and operate the new schools borrows debt from banks and funds to do so, paying it back with interest in regular allotments, funded by payments in turn from the Local Authority. This allows a vast number of schools to be built now, instead of directly spending Treasury funds upfront.
The problem, just like the housing mortgage market, is that banks are so unsure they have the funds required to cover their liabilities that they are not lending money. Just as people are struggling to get a mortgage, so too are various private sector bidders struggling to raise senior debt. If deals fail to close, can we build the new schools we want to?
Where We Spend Our Money
Funding for Building Schools for the Future is split three ways, with 50% allocated to new buildings; 35% to major refurbishment works, and 15% to minor refurbishment.
Considering the biggest chunk, new build, a school of 1,200 pupils will typically cost £18M, with a floor area of circa 10,000 square meters (108,000 sq ft). Much of this is spent on the construction of a major piece of architecture, to last another thirty plus years before it is knocked down or refurbished again. During that lifecycle, it needs occasional refreshing and remodelling to cope with the continuous change in learning philosophy in a cost efficient manner – but that is not easy to achieve, with many school designs still fundamentally un-adaptable.
In recent times, through projects like Project Faraday, much more awareness has emerged within the sector of the importance of settings – how we lay out furniture – and the design of learning spaces to cope with a range of learning activities. We can agree that what affects learning, on a day to day basis, is more about the shape and size of the classrooms, learning studios and informal learning spaces, plus the type and arrangements of furniture within it, than whether the building is an iconic piece of architecture or not.
Yet, still, we spend the majority of capital investment on building buildings.
What if we could build schools in a much more cost efficient way, that would be highly adaptive to change, would support our learners and staff better pastorally, and could be a closer part of our community? Perhaps the opportunity of the credit crunch is to make some radical changes in how we think about building new schools.
Size Matters
Added to this is an increasing awareness of the benefits of small schools. As Charles Leadbeater, one of the world’s foremost thinkers on innovation and one of the original proponents of personalised learning recently pointed out:
Monolithic, mass secondary schools should be broken up – if not physically then at least organisationally, into units of no more than 450, so that even large schools feel small. That would allow more different learning environments – vocational, specialist, academic, catch-up – to co-exist within a single school. – Charles Leadbeater, What Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning
This is not new thinking, even within the educational sector. For many years, people have discussed how scaling down factories, workplaces and schools could increase productivity by increasing the feeling of familiarity and comfort. Any more than 150 to 250 people, and the chance of having “meaningful relationships” decreases.
In the world famous book The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, we were introduced to Professor Dunbar of Oxford, who had proposed in 1992 that the average size of a social group that is still somehow manageable for a human was 150 people, called Dunbar’s number.
We learned that Gore-Tex had a policy of a maximum factory size of 150. Once a factory started getting larger than that, it would split off, amoeba like, into two new factories. More than this number, and productivity would dip as relationships between staff became less meaningful.
Management guru Tom Peters similarly proposed the “magic number” of 153 back in 19931. He quotes sources, amongst others, such as New Scientist: “Sociologists have known since the 1950s that there is a critical threshold in the region of 150 to 200, with larger companies suffering a disproportionate amount of absenteeism and sickness”.
It seems that this number is historically well known. The New Scientist continued with an examination of some of Dunbar’s examples: "Neolithic villages from the Middle East around 6000 B.C. typically seemed to have contained 120 to 150 people. ... The Hutterites, a group of contemporary North American religious fundamentalists who live and farm communally, regard 150 as the maximum size for their communities. ... They find that when there are more than about 150 individuals, they cannot control the behaviour of the members by peer pressure alone."
Peters, one of the earliest seer of the knowledge economy, reaches his own conclusion. “Arguably, we got away with violating these "laws" during the age of mass production, when the human hand rather than the human head was the primary work tool. In the craft tradition that preceded the Industrial Revolution, the head reigned supreme. Now we're back to head work, with a vengeance. And 150, give or take, may be the answer. Richard Branson thinks so. And Microsoft's Bill Gates, wrestling with dramatic growth, has latched on to 200 as his maximum unit size.”
Much has been said elsewhere about our shift to the knowledge economy from the industrial economy, and how much of schooling is still based on industrial economy principles. What is often unsaid is that the current, vast size of schools is as much a relic of industrial economy thinking – the relics of “make work like a production line” Taylorism thinking - such as our “age not stage” systems, our school bells, and teaching subjects in classes of 30 students and one teacher. Indeed, some relics of the Agricultural economy still remain, such as the school holiday timings, so it is little surprise that a decade after the dawn of the world wide web, we still build new “old schools”.
We have been arguing for larger schools for so long, the rhetoric is entrenched. The government stance, when challenged that the number of pupil exclusions rise when the school size is above 1,500, and fall when below 1,000, is that large schools offer “a wider range of services”2. Over half a million learners now learn in a school larger than 1,500, a 200%+ increase between 1996 and 2005.
Indeed, US research, following significant national debate that a large school of 1,900 pupils was responsible for causing the alienation and isolation that led to the Columbine High School massacre, suggests that schools above 2,000 pupils are 22% more likely to experience serious violence3.
Ask many within the educational design industry just why schools are so large, and factory terminology begins pouring out. “Economies of scale”4 and “centralisation of resources” are two typical arguments in favour. The other argument is that they are untried and untested.
But there has been substantive research into the benefits of “small schools”, commonly defined as schools with 400-800 students in a secondary school5. Research – mostly from the US – implies that aside from academic success being higher or at least equal to that of large schools, other benefits in a pastoral sense include better behaviour, better attendance, lower drop out and greater interpersonal relationships between staff and students6.
A ”Schools within a School” model is a partial implementation, the idea that a large school can negate the effects of its size by breaking the student population down into smaller groupings, whilst still retaining the “economies of scale” of a larger school. A typical implementation of this is to assign students to groups of 200-400 for their entire time within the school, where the majority of their learning and social activities take place, building a sense of identity throughout their school life with a smaller group of peers.
Crucially, some researchers note that establishing this model does not create the same benefits as those associated with small schools, unless they are “separate entities, administratively, programmatically, culturally, and probably with respect to aims”7.
A UK example of a School within a School is Bishops Park, Clacton, which sadly has not been given the chance to prove itself it deserved. A visit to that school several years ago brought me into contact with the most confident, self assured learners I had ever met.
The evidence for the effectiveness of the benefits of School within a School models is “limited… but it suggests that students benefit from this form of organization if the SWAS is sufficiently separate and distinct from the other school(s) housed in the same building”5.
On a wider scale, small schools have been implemented Authority wide in places like Indianapolis, whose five large public schools were broken up and transformed to create a “network of efficient small schools”8 of maximum 400 pupils per school, achieved with a £7M grant.
Why and How to Implement Small Schools within the UK
If we have a sudden constraint on debt, and the school building programme grinds to a halt, we have a unique opportunity to consider implementing small schools.
This requires a completely different real estate approach to the current one. Instead of owning or buying large brownfield or greenfield sites, we should look at occupying existing buildings, such as office spaces, or former warehouses and factories, that are close to the serving communities to reduce the carbon impact of travelling. This has a substantial sustainability impact, as building a new building is incredibly carbon intensive.
By choosing a small school strategy of 400 pupils split into two, 200 groupings, the area required would be significantly less area per pupils, and perhaps closer to 2,000 square metres, or 22,000 sq ft.
Many commercial offices have floor plates of 20,000 to 25,000 sq ft, so this may involve leasing one floors of a commercial building on a ten year lease. At the moment, there is a massive oversupply of commercial property within the UK – as the economy worsens and more large companies go into administration, whilst developers continue to complete massive projects underway over the last two years, there will be significant deals to be done, allowing up to two years rent free, and no deposits to be put down.
Schools are more likely to want the bottom floors of a building, which is the opposite of what organisations typically want. Rents, even in areas of central London, could be near £35 per sq ft per annum, or £770,000, and could be fixed for a significant period.
Above: a commercial grade A office space, ready to be fitted out
Leasing two floors will mean no money is spent on building the building, only on the fit out. This can be accomplished relatively cheaply, as the standard would not need to be that of a modern corporate office, but could be expected to be £30 per sq ft: £660,000.
Of course, little of this money would need to be borrowed from the private sector – this would already be mostly available within the funds contained within Local Authorities and the Treasury. But where it was borrowed, the significantly lower amount would be more readily available.
When implementing this solution, a variety of wholesale changes could be made to make the schools run efficiently. All servers would be outsources to a server farm – the quality of technology today means there is almost no excuse for not saving space and putting machines where the experts are.
More importantly, more investment would be put into thinking about designing a range of learning areas, with good furniture and a proper consideration of interior design. Furniture in the commercial sector, of course, can be bought and paid for over ten years or more, with occasionally refreshes along the way, providing a cost effective way of minimising the upfront costs of setting up.
With this type of space, it would be a chance to dispose of the “one type fits all” mentality of designing classrooms – a space which is assumed can cope with any type of learning you can throw at it, but with the onslaught of personalisation is increasingly the lowest common denominator in design terms. Better would be to provide a suite of areas each designed for very specific purposes, whether it is a space designed for “attention”, such as a lecture room, or a space designed for “collaboration”, such as a project area.
The teaching team would contain a number of staff from different disciplines, who instead of teaching individual subjects would work together to set work that helped learners learn through projects, or research, or other “hands on” approaches proven to be more effective at developing long term understanding of a discipline and, more importantly, how to think interdisciplinary.
Many commercial spaces have good floor to ceiling heights, allowing power to be put in boxes in the floor as opposed to the walls. This allows the provision of much larger spaces, and it should be remembered that until laptop batteries get seriously good, learners will need increasing power in the years ahead as technology becomes more ubiquitous in day to day learning.
Implementing such a proposal would be radical, but there would be numerous other benefits too. One of the most serious challenges facing the teaching profession today is the imminent retirement of a large proportion of the country’s head teachers, and the lack of suitably trained candidates to replace them.
There is no doubt: running an enterprise with a multi-million pound budget, a varied and complex team of staff plus a “customer” base of 1,200 a day, dealing with problems from social (bullying) to financial (funding) to infrastructure (BSF) is a task that would make many an aspiring CEO blanch in the business world.
For a small school of 400 pupils, the challenges would be much less, and the school could probably be run full time by the equivalent of a deputy, who would be much more involved in steering teaching and learning direction. Administrative tasks could be dealt with by a team that look after a number of different small schools.
This is where the economy of scale argument and the centralisation of resources argument come back to play, since both these things are possible when treating small schools as a network, rather than independent enterprises. Purchasing can be handled centrally by the Local Authority or by a federation body. Catering would be simpler and benefit from reduced numbers. Specialist staff would be split amongst the schools but could regular come together for knowledge sharing days.
So the major drawback is the lack of external sports facilities, and the lack of external play. But sports facilities could still be created in the local community, and the school day re-organised to make best use of a short travel to them, shared with other small schools. Likewise, the last thing is that the critical mass of large schools allows for sports teams, school newspapers, musical groups, debate clubs, and all kinds of extra-curricular activities – there would need to be consideration on how to build a network of these activities, too.
The lack of external play is more serious a problem, but we should consider something very important at this point. With hundreds of people not circulating around the school from lesson to lesson, and subjects being taught in a more interdisciplinary fashion (reducing the start up time and shut down time and the beginning and end of each lesson), the amount of time actually spent learning would be significantly more intensive, allowing the school day to potentially be reduced. This would allow social time to take place in, well, social time.
Added to this, it is likely that non-urban implementations of small schools may be situated in quiet locations where a degree of external play is possible. Or approaches like that of Hampden Gurney, London, could be approached, where the external space is a protected desk on the roof terrace of the building.
Impossible? Let’s consider the example of Unlimited School, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Located in the top floor of a shopping centre, with a maximum capacity of 400 pupils and a fit out cost of £600,000, Discovery is a prime example of a small school integrated in its community, set up by the parents. An additional sum of money was invested as a seed fund, the interest payments of which cover the rent over a twelve year term. An adjacent office block is also leased on an eight year term. The spaces within both the “sites” are highly flexible learning settings, designed for personalisation.
Its central location within Christchurch is designed to make best use of local facilities instead of building their own, including use of the nearby National Library, a commercial gym in off peak periods during the day, and a nearby university for certain specialist labs.
External audits suggest a high level of learner engagement and a low level of bullying and anti-social behaviour.
The Final Word
A lease and fit out approach to creating new, small schools is an opportunity to focus spending where it matters most: the learning space, whilst providing a significant range of pastoral benefits to our learners.
It should be recognised that the current economic timing is an opportunity, not a threat, to improving education and learning within this country. With the property market facing oversupply problems, the time is now.
References
- http://www.tompeters.com/col_entries.php?note=005388
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6541251.stm
- Leung, A, & Ferris, J.S (2005), School Size and Youth Violence, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
- Chakraborty et al (2000), Economies of Scale in Public Education: An Econometric Analysis, , Contemporary Economic Policy
- Williams, D. T (1990) The Dimensions of Education: Recent Research on School Size
- Cotton, K (1996), School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance, NWREL
- Howley, C (1996). “Literature Review.” In Sizing up Schooling: A West Virginia Analysis and Critique. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, West Virginia University, Morgan-town, WV, 1996
- http://www.uindy.edu/news/?p=246
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