Schools
Can a new school building directly impact academic results?
Antonia Berry reflects on the widespread benefits of a major project I recall sitting at the back of my Maths classroom, a typical angst-ridden teenager, etching some tortured declaration of love into the chipped wooden desk. I remember swinging on my cracked plastic tub chair paying little heed to Mr Needson’s trigonometry demonstration on the grubby whiteboard. The room is like all the others in the school – fit for purpose (just). It can house thirty or so desks. The décor is tired but passable. A couple of ceiling tiles have slipped out of place. A collection of posters displaying ‘motivational’ quotes about the value of hard work are stuck to the walls with Blu Tack. At other points in the room, evidence of posters removed can be seen where the paint is stripped away to plaster in Blu Tack shaped splodges. Windows, stiff with age, are wedged open a crack where possible. The room is stuffy and hot and I am struggling to think of anything other than dreamy Richard Patterson in the year above me. A couple of decades on and I am Depute Rector of St Columba’s School, one of the highest achieving schools in Scotland, watching from the front row the impact that a well-designed, well maintained teaching space has on the concentration, behaviour and learning of young people and wondering why some headteachers and LEAs of years gone by have failed to recognise this. In the Independent sector particularly, the maintenance of school buildings, many often listed, can be a millstone
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Summer 2019
around the Board of Governors’ neck, a black hole into which money is sunk with few visible benefits to pupils. Committing to spending millions on the purchase and renovation of new buildings can be an even more daunting business: a tough sell to the parents on whom a capital levy will inevitably have to be placed; a challenging negotiation with local residents and neighbours; a long and time-consuming planning process. For many schools, significant investment in buildings and classroom design is a risk that is simply not worth taking, but for those who have the vision and the courage to commit to making that vision a reality, the reward for pupils and teachers can be immeasurable. It is two years since St Columba’s opened its state-of-theart teaching facility, The Girdwood Building, named after the school’s last Rector, David Girdwood. It has been two years of teaching and learning in the thirteen new classrooms, of tailored pastoral care in the Guidance Suite, of quiet reflective reading and study in the new library, and it is time to consider whether it has all been worth it. The School long ago purchased two detached Victorian houses that sat adjacent to the school grounds, Kilmorack and Cromdale (one slightly worse for wear), and employed Page\Park Architects in Glasgow to design a new School building that would fit seamlessly into the School campus and the beautiful stone-built village of Kilmacolm. Externally
