So I’m not going on the SEAL training tomorrow as I’ve had plenty of time out of school recently. One such time was today when I was lucky enough to attend a seminar relating to Building Schools for the Future.

It was called “How learning environments can enhance teacher well-being” and was organised by the British Council for School Environments, who I’d never heard of before, and the Teacher Support Network.

There were lots of people there high up in the trade unions, architects, representatives from the DCSF, some people from my local authority, a principle from Australia, and people responsible for Health and Safety in Local Government and various consultants. As far as I could tell, there were just two teachers, both of us in leadership positions at our school.

Basically, I think they’re trying to learn the lessons of the first wave of BSF (which is massive capital expenditure on buildings) where schools have been unhappy with their product. It seemed to be moving on from the “Don’t build a new old school!” type argument (this is that you should do something suitable for the 21st century with your building, rather than just build a new school that is the same as the old one).

The main message though, was that the users of the buildings should be consulted at every opportunity. This is, of course, very important. I think we’ve done some of that, with our consulting students on “happy” and “not happy” places in our present school, and students have had a very real say in the transformation of our playground (I will write more about this another time). Staff have been consulted, probably not as widely as we would like. I blame this almost entirely on the deadlines that our Head is subjected to in terms of submitting various documents, bids, and visions. I really hope that we can consult and debate more. I think everyone accepts that a successful vision is not ‘handed down’.

I have the utmost respect for our Headteacher, and I think she’s incredibly capable. I wonder, though, if there was some lack of foresight in putting Education professionals in charge of a multi-million pound building program. That appeared to be what some people were saying today.

Some of the organisations there had done a survey. Some of the survey results were unsuprising (classrooms too small, staff rooms look like 1970s Old People’s homes, etc etc) but one of the unions representatives there was saying it’s outrageous that teachers don’t have their own classroom. I disagree with that fundamentally, because I think we need a wide variety of learning spaces to cater for the variety of teaching and learning styles that we have in our schools – and I don’t think any learning space should be ‘owned’ by anyone any more. One of our best learning spaces is our outside classroom – and that’s definitely shared.

The last thing on consultation, and I made this point today. If you ask teachers what they want in their school, they’ll say clean toilets, decent staff room, place for PPA to be productive, and modern technology in a well-resourced classroom. That’s not transformational for the 21st Century (in my opinion), but what do you expect when that’s what teachers experience and they are a product of their environment. They want the ‘bad’ things to be fixed. I think that in any consultation we have to ensure that we allow teachers to think far far wider than that – and the impression I got today is that in the (admittedly limited compared to what we would like) consultations we’ve done my school has been far better at providing that permission than the majority of schools and authorities have been so far.

I also found out that architects get blamed for lots of things, and on a recent conference I took away that we should “presume honest intentions” when you get annoyed or angry with people. The architects clearly don’t want to create new old schools or poorly heated buildings. So we need to work with them.

Lastly, I learned that making schools modern buildings with materials that, for example, deal with heat effectively, requires far more expensive materials (that meet different standards to the minimum) and with it being public money that is spent, we need to use those buildings for more than educating students for 195 days a year for about 8 hours a day. Our school is again much better than that, as I speak (or write) there are adult education classes and community sports events going on at my school (it’s nearly 9pm) and that’s another place where we’re ahead of the game. But I am starting to see where all the jargon that refers to “Extended Schools” has come from.

Oh, and as a PS, PFI is a nightmare, but being an old lefty, I think I knew that!