What type of building is best for our Children's Education?

Educational justification for the "New Build" Option

This is the most important area of all! For the sake of our children

The educational environment and wellbeing of the children concerns members of the Action Group as much as it does any other parents, many of our group members are parents.

It also concerns us as much as it does any other education professionals, as our group members include Heads, Deputy Heads, Teachers, Senior Lecturers and Lecturers.
All members of our group are committed to ensuring a good quality education for the children of Stockton Heath and thus, this is an area we have researched intensively.

There has been much misrepresented justification for the new build in that a 'shiny new school', it is glibly asserted, will be the best option for our children and will provide the best educational environment for our children, in the 21st Century.

Such assertions are based on little available evidence. Mr Warren was challenged on a number of occasions, including at the Development Control Committee, to provide evidence to substantiate the claim that the new build will provide the best quality educational environment. He freely admitted that no such evidence was in existence.

There is, however, a range of research which demonstrates that new build is poorly correlated with educational outcomes, and that a wider mix of factors is important in contributing to an effective learning environment.

The major report on the matter, " The Impact of School Learning Environments" prepared by the University of Newcastle and sponsored by CfBT Research and Development for the Design Council's Learning Environments Campaign, looks in detail at academic research on learning environments and how they affect the people who use them.

It reviews the research literature on school building programmes across the UK. It identifies a variety of lessons to be learned from previous phases of school building if the government's £2 billion flagship 'Building schools for the future' (BSF) programme is to succeed.

The team found evidence that while improvements to schools where the buildings fell below an acceptable standard did have a significant impact upon health, student morale and student performance, the same could not be said where already sound school buildings were demolished to make way for new structures. Further research reports, entitled School Building Programmes: motivations, consequences and implications and The impact of school environments: a literature review , cite research carried out in 2000, which demonstrate that student performance does not improve when already sound facilities are upgraded via demolition.

“This would strongly suggest that the government's school building programme would benefit by providing buildings that are adequate to the needs of the school, rather than offering 'bells and whistles' and expecting standards to rise dramatically”, says researcher Pam Woolner.

These are vital conclusions given that it is agreed by all that the current school is structurally sound. Whilst it is agreed that the Horsa buildings will, at some stage, need to be replaced, the previous Ofsted reports have never suggested that the main school building is inadequate.

Sean McDougall, leader of the Design Council’s Learning Environments campaign, comments that: “We are now at a point where almost half our children leave school with less than the recommended 5 A-C GCSEs and the evidence suggests that new buildings alone will do very little to improve this situation…Real educational transformation will come from a change in the way that we provide education – not the place where we provide it. We need courage to apply everything we know about how children learn and prepare them for the multi-cultural, team-focused, fluid society they will be entering”.
These and other reports demonstrate conclusively that the new build option is not a quick-fix solution that can engender improved educational performance, and that a wider array of factors – including investment in teaching staff – is of greater import. For this reason, we again urge that the Executive Committee looks at the refurbishment option and presser officers to search for a design that meets all of the DfES standards, within the given budgets.

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New buildings for Stockton Heath: the reality!

These photographs show what the proposed new school for Stockton Heath could look like based on what we know of the plans from the artists impression. They show in much more detail the materials used and provide a clearer case for why such an architectural design is totally out of context for our village community.

Practical problems associated with this building have included:

• Ceiling tiles in the classrooms lifting whenever it is windy,
• Low specification flooring materials that do not withstand the volume of people traffic during the course of the day
• Inadequate guttering that leaks at the corners and with rivets that start to rust within months of completion
• Classrooms that have low ceilings and feel cramped
• Lighting that is energy efficient but offers inadequate output.
• Corridors with no natural day light providing a ‘hemmed in’ feeling

No details have been given to assure our community that such deficiencies will not occur.