This week Toby Young, once again promoting his slender understanding of the context of education in this country, decided to launch the reactionary idea that architecture has no impact on the way kids learn. This of course was an opinion, and an amateur one at that. It’s a worry, particularly in the week that leaks suggest the government is seeking to abolish or merge a great many of the important quangos, the very organisations that are set up to prevent the hegemony of amateur ill-informed opinions. It sounds increasingly like autocracy, rather than big society to me.
One of the things Toby Young would know if he actually spoke to young people or teachers across the country is that learning environments massively impact a pupil’s motivation and ability to learn. A great deal of very powerful research proves this, not least the brilliant pioneers of this work Tim Rudd and his colleagues at Futurelab, the organisation set up through NESTA and funded by the now defunct BECTA, who have systematically produced innovative resources and tools for young people and teachers to help them redesign the crumbling school fabric of this country.
I daresay that for children who grow up in affluent ABC1 des res neighbourhoods with clever parents and lovely homes and gardens, exposure to arts and culture, holidays, hobbies and wide-ranging experiences, having one miserable environment in your life doesn’t harm you. I remember my own, vastly expensive private school was cold, damp, uncomfortable and certainly uncreative. But I guess I had enough nice places to escape to compensate for those privations. But if you’re growing up in a sink estate with nothing about you but tower blocks, of course working in a leaking, broken down, 40 year old building (at best) designed like a prison, it’s likely to have a diminishing effect on your aspirations. The reality facing so many kids is that they actually seldom see any positive environments, and so only the most resilient and imaginative, or those with stable, successful families get the chance to envisage different environments. Without being able to see the kinds of environments that might change their lives and opportunities, it’s pretty hard to develop ambitions.
If we truly want to transform our education system, and I repeat this over and over again, we need to consult the people who most use it. The consumers; our children. Only they will really be able to get themselves where they will need to be in the future. But Lord Puttnam the man who launched and still spearheads Futurelab can say this with more authority than I. This was part of his passionate call to support the Building Schools for the Future Programme (also now defunct):
We need to ensure we do not embody old and outmoded practices in bricks and mortar and glass and steel, but that rather we build in the pedagogies and practices appropriate for 21st century learning. We have to rethink what a learning space is, who learns there, who are the teachers, mentors and support staff. We need to challenge what is learnt, by whom, when, where and how, and we need to consider how new developments and technologies present new opportunities for new learning networks and arrangements that offer greater diversity in learning approaches, and how foci and groupings might best be utilised.
When we hear stories of children or schools who are thought to be underachieving, often it is our instinct to lay the blame on the pupils themselves, their families, or the teachers, yet we seldom ask if the educational offering we’re presenting to those children is out of keeping with their needs and the realities of their day-to-day lives. Behind the sensationalist headlines, we know the vast majority of educators enter the profession because they want the best for our children. We also know from research that children and young people have a wealth of remarkable talent and potential that we need to be able to tap into and support, and we know we can do so under the right conditions. The BSF and PCP programmes represent an opportunity to develop systems and spaces for the future that will enable us to do exactly that. We simply cannot afford to miss this opportunity to transform education.
Now Lord Puttnam and Futurelab, are not amateurs, they are experts. We’ll be very lucky not to lose them.