agenda debate
this week’s question
Do good buildings produce better educated children? yes
says Rowan Moore, Observer architecture critic
Buildings can’t get children through GCSEs, or enthuse them with literature in the style of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. They can’t galvanise a school football team to achieve unimagined success. But they can make a huge difference to teachers’ abilities to bring such things about. It’s relatively easy to show how much harm bad buildings can do. The wrong kinds of corridors can create havens for bullying. Tatty, dysfunctional structures can demotivate and demoralise. A leaking roof, undersized classrooms, or poor heating put direct obstacles in the way of a school’s success. Physical environment that shows no sign of care or pride can communicate the same lack to the people who use it. In fiction, architecture is intrinsic to awful schools’ awfulness: Wackford Squeers’s Dotheboys Hall, St Trinian’s, the grim grey Fond de l’Étang in the film The Chorus. It’s slightly harder to put the case positively, but in the 1980s and early 90s Hampshire county council produced a series of schools that were humane, delightful and well made, but also had an element of intrigue: they weren’t just ranks of classrooms connected by corridors. More recently Kingsdale school, a south London comprehensive, was made over by the architects de Rilke Marsh Morgan. They converted an underused courtyard into a new heart for the school covered by a glamorous roof made of the same stuff as the Eden Project in Cornwall. It was sane, playful and stylish at the same time. By every measure, Kingsdale’s performance improved. Clearly this was mostly down to the headmaster Steve Morrison and his teachers, but the building complemented their efforts. It showed that someone could be bothered with the places where they spent their days. Morrison also drove the building project, showing
that good design works best when it is part of a larger vision. It can, surely, only be a good thing if teachers and pupils set off each morning to a place that gladdens the heart, works well, and shows thought, imagination and dedication in its making. In business it is widely accepted that better environments attract better staff and motivate them to work better; the same is true of teachers. And, even if design had no measurable outcomes, children should have access to good architecture as much as they should have access to art and music. Sadly, the last government’s mighty splurge of school building yielded few examples of what I’m talking about. There were a few city academies by big name architects, swish but not always user-friendly. Otherwise new buildings were dished out in bundles, in which one consortium might deliver all the schools for an entire city. The vital link between users and designers was lost. Processes were devised and consultants appointed to minimise cost overruns: they created the certainty, rather than the possibility, that money would be wasted. Michael Gove has complained, wrongly, that architects creamed off funds. Architects were badly squeezed, as was any budget that might go towards anything above the bog standard. It was the accountants, contractors, lawyers and management consultants who troughed deeply. It has not yet fully dawned on the country how much junk is being built as a result – schools like business park units at best, prisons at worst. So I’m not wholly opposed to Gove’s putting the brakes on the school building programme. But I hope he’s not intending to stop all thought of improvements to the environment of schools for the indefinite future. Teachers matter more than buildings, but teachers also need buildings that help them do their job.
It still comes down to the ability of the teacher to inspire students. Buildings cannot teach
The ‘glamorous’ new courtyard at Kingsdale school, south London: ‘by every measure, performance improved’. DRMM
NO
says Rick Jones, teacher and journalist
“I’m a teacher. All I need are minds for moulding,” the newly arrived supply pompously announces in the film School of Rock as he hits upon the idea of turning the dull, conditioned juveniles in front of him into star musicians. Every teacher, however enthusiastic about improved premises and the latest teaching aids, still harbours this romantic notion of the perfect pedagogue who can work his/ her magic on the young mind even in the dingiest of situations. Environment is helpful to a good education but not essential. It still comes down to the ability of the teacher to transport and inspire students verbally. Buildings cannot teach. That is the specialised skill of the professional educators, but the amounts lavished on construction schemes sometimes make it seem as if the bricks and mortar themselves were the all-important element in learning. The announced discontinuation of building works might be seen as a return to the idea that the teacher is the centre of the education universe. Disappointment about shelved projects is understandable. Three
football Africa’s kids improvise to play the beautiful game It was very tempting, we must admit, to caption these pictures: “Loughborough university’s balldesigning boffins unveil prototypes for 2014 World Cup”. But that would be doing a grand disservice to Jessica Hilltout, the 33-year-old Belgian-born photographer who flew to Africa, taking with her a Hasselblad, 300 rolls of film and a crate of new footballs, hoping to chart something of the continent’s joyous love affair with football. She drove 20,000 km, through seven countries, photographing the makeshift balls, the odd shoes, the tired dry feet, in every village which plays football, which is every village in Africa. The balls are made of stockings, of rolled rubber bands,
4
of tied rags; and speak of the happy doggedness with which toddlers and teens persevere in trying to get better at football. As far as you could get from professional sponsored equipment: as close as you could get to learning balance, and control, and what subtle tensions of human tendons can do to inanimate objects. Ghana, where last week I saw a bunch of 13-year-olds playing with just such a bunch of rags, came heart-close to the semi-final. To get there, Ghana had beaten the USA. Who came top of the group containing England. Euan Ferguson Jessica Hilltout’s book, Amen, is to be published soon in Britain, or find it now via fnac.com
The new review | 11.07.10 | The Observer
types lose out: architects and building contractors financially, political left-wingers ideologically and headteachers egotistically as the projects for which their incumbencies will be remembered founder, their names perhaps no longer to be etched into the fresh concrete. It is the head who stirs up the excitement at staff briefings. Rank-and-file teachers tend to be sceptical. They have seen too many architects’ plans, so sunny and inviting in the drawings, the trees in leaf, the litter absent, the contented students in smart uniforms not bent on damaging property. I visit dozens of schools as a supply teacher and like everyone I am taken with a particular new south London academy (St Matthew, in Lewisham). Its steel and crystal buildings are impressive, its gadgetry a talking point. The original commissioning body had been persuaded by the feature of electronic windows operated from the light switch, though in one classroom the mechanism has seized up with the window stuck open. Freeing it is beyond the capability of the on-site technicians and, embarrassingly, someone has to be sent for who has specialist knowledge of how to close a window. The attraction of costly wonders strives against the common-sense reluctance to spend on ungrateful, unappreciative youth. Indeed, it seems that the more the present generation of
students are spoiled with new devices and architecture, the less likely they are to care for either. It hurts to see the first graffiti on a virgin wall. As a supply, I have restricted access to the liberal indulgences of the photocopier and the stationery cupboard and am conditioned to austerity. All around I witness terrifying waste. Mountains of worksheets untidy the classrooms while the discarded text books which they have replaced gather dust on shelves. Elegant buildings can inspire but generally only from the outside, the view to gratify parents. Charles Barry Jr’s Dulwich college is awesome. But interiors, which the students occupy, vary little between schools and often the difference is only the amount of chewing gum trodden into the carpet or the freshness of the posters. I recently took over a classroom at the top of a panel-and-glass tower and taught French in it for a term. It had no whiteboard, not even a computer, but sweeping prospects over Swanage. I brought in a drum and drilled year nine in Gallic chanted phrases which the recalcitrant hard nuts would taunt me with after hours. “Ma personnalité – je suis sportif!” they jeered through the (sliding) window without admitting their minds had been moulded. “Well at least you learned something,” I countered. No tapes. No expensive language lab. Barely any books. Just Sir on a bongo.