The Issue

School heads seem to focus most of their attention on financial and personnel issues. What has been consistently ignored is the importance of the physical environment to pupils’ ability to learn.

It is a fact that the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services expressed no interest in being offered the opportunity to show our schools’ managers how their expensive buildings could be managed to enhance the learning process.

Yet comparatively simple lessons at often little or no cost have been shown to dramatically improve learners’ achievements.

Background

On January 16th 2002, an Audit Commission report criticised school architects and builders for failing to take notice of the needs and views of “end-users” - i.e. pupils. The Commission assessment stated that the process for improving or constructing schools was not cost effective.

The old DfEE’s assessment of suppliers to the Building Schools for the Future programme focused on project management capacity, risk mitigation and financial controls that were meant to provide answers with regard to costs – but not in relation to effectiveness. With the current cash limitations slowing down the BSF programme, perhaps it is time to look again at what environments are most effective for our learners – and where and how learning has been shown to be best promoted, giving the highest possible results for our children.

One process favoured by the American architect, Bruce Jilk, is the so-called Design Down programme. This is a structured programme of consultation with all stakeholders before and during the design of any new school.

As Chair of the Education Committee of the American Institute of Architects, Jilk consulted and designed learning environments in over twenty states in the USA. He also contributed to new school environments in Austria, Australia, Finland, Saudi Arabia, Iceland, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands. Unfortunately, at the time of this interview Jilk’s experience has not been utilised in the UK.

Working alongside the Design Down process in Reykjavik, Iceland, one UK company was called upon to share its expertise in ensuring that schools constructed a high-quality (though not necessarily high cost) learning environment for pupils.

Quesco Ltd. had already had a significant learning impact within the UK as its unique Envirolearn programme was adopted by Learndirect as the basis for its design manual for approximately 3000 learning centres.

Based on a decade's research, Envirolearn grew as an outcome of perception surveys involving 36,000 students together with follow-up research funded by the EU.

Although in use in Iceland and attracting strong interest from schools and governments in South-East Asia and Latin America, no interest has been expressed by those in charge of the Department for Education at this time.

In the national pilot evaluation scheme carried out by Learndirect over a 2-year period, it was found that Envirolearn’s introduction in the design of the learning area had a dramatic impact upon student achievement.

Significantly, across all the centres, the overall increase in course completions was 126%. Based on meeting the needs of learners in a cost-effective way, Envirolearn attracted the attention of educational organisations wishing to help learners to achieve their goals.

However, Envirolearn does not provide the glamour often sought by architects wanting to deliver an eye-catching exterior to a new school building. But perhaps the time has come to begin assessing how learning environments are designed from the perspective of the learner, as opposed to that of the builder!

Let's Focus on Learners

Quesco’s Ray Kohn has worked for many decades in education – as an adult and further education teacher, lecturer, quality manager, Vice-Principal and Principal. Throughout this time Ray Kohn has spent hundreds of hours talking to learners about their learning environment and how things could be better achieved.

He found that negative perceptions of any learning centre impact adversely on the learning process but by changing these perceptions you can create an environment where people will learn more effectively.

Fascinated by this important subject, Ray Kohn developed mass surveys to identify and evaluate the patterns of preference amongst learners.

“I began to collect large amounts of data. Putting that together with the experience I had already in the sector it became clear that some patterns and trends were emerging.”

With the help of a European-funded piece of research that Ray Kohn directed, he started to tease out critical emerging trends thus helping him to develop the Envirolearn system.

“The essential question for schools and the Department for Education is: What makes the environment an effective place in which to learn? Envirolearn addresses this question by recognising and interpreting learner behaviour and examining the environmental factors that influence the learning process.”

Commenting on Envirolearn, Professor Simon Roodhouse said: “It is surprising how much is spent on school, college and university buildings without any clear idea of how their design might affect student learning; but the tools are now available, and it is only a matter of time before some institutions move ahead using approaches such as Envirolearn.”

The Learndirect Project

In the early 1990s, Ray Kohn visited over a hundred Learndirect centres all around the UK and spoke to students, teachers, support workers and managers to gauge their views. The experience and ideas provided through these visits and the concepts already developed by Envirolearn, provided the basis for the Learndirect design manual.

“The design manual is not there to say this is what a centre should look like – it is there to give managers practical tips and ideas that can help in designing and best optimising their learning centres.”

So, what are the issues to consider when putting a learning space together?

The Learning Space

Ray Kohn defines two main areas of a learning environment as the ‘Macrospace’ and the ‘Microspace’.

He explained: “The Macrospace is the whole area of the school or centre and includes things like lighting, ceiling heights and acoustics. Clearly too much noise is bad for learners as it stops them concentrating, but it's equally true that many people find silence a bit unnerving.”

“The Macrospace also affects the layout of desks. The vast majority of pupils find it off-putting if there is activity taking place behind their backs. Ideally, desks should be laid out in a way that allows for the free movement of people but with minimum disruption to the learner. Often desks are laid out all facing the front or, when using computer screens, with learners facing the wall. The former only favours one type of non-interactive learning and the latter only serves the convenience of the location of electricity points. Do we seriously want plug sockets to determine how we manage the learning environment, or should we be thinking more about how to promote the learning process itself?"

“The Microspace is about what the learner feels when they are sitting at a desk, or at any other learning location. Most want to have a sense of security and do not want to feel vulnerable. Therefore learners like to feel something around them but, at the same time, they like to look up and see the bigger picture. In effect, learners want to be in control of what they are looking at”.

Ray Kohn described one other important aspect of the Microspace. “When learning at a computer screen, partition heights are important – too high and learners feel trapped, too low and they feel exposed, which undermines their confidence. Colour is also important. Too bright and learners will soon get a headache, too dark and it’s depressing. The Microspace should be warm and calm, like a dark orange tone, for example.”

Theory

The delivery of effective learning is critically affected by the competence and enthusiasm of teaching staff and the quality of teaching material.

However, it was also found that 90% of learners benefit from the physical environment in which the learning takes place being structured around certain key principles.

Without well-designed, but not necessarily expensive, learning environments, teachers often found that they were dealing with the education of their pupils ‘despite’ their surroundings. Critically, once classroom environment was enhanced teachers found that the ‘new’ environment fundamentally supported and complemented their efforts.

Envirolearn discovered that there are a small group of key Microspace issues that affect learner concentration and achievement:

• lines of sight
• sound contexts
• differential lighting & colour
• space structures (enclosure principles)
• construction of different communities of interest

Most of the advice and structured support provided by Ray Kohn and his associates relate directly to these five areas.

When providing advice about Macrospace issues, it has been easiest to show school managers, planners, senior officers and politicians how three distinct approaches have frequently been competing for dominance.

The design approaches to the construction of schools and the layout of classrooms are basically:

a) Economic. i.e. We have this much money or this much building space, so we can afford to construct this much

b) Marketing. i.e. Aesthetic considerations married to those of image projection determining a common appearance

c) Educational. i.e. The most effective ways that people learn appear to show that this type of design should work best for them

All three approaches have a role to play. However, for too long almost sole focus has rested upon both the Economic and Marketing aspects of any new school environment.

Envirolearn provides a high level of expertise in perhaps the most important area of consideration for key policy formers and implementing organisations – education and ways to effect better learning environments.

Significantly, if Envirolearn’s educational concepts are married to both economic and marketing aspects, this co-operation has been proven to produce outstanding educational results.