Our New School

Problem

Schools are often isolated from their community and don’t always provide a space that’s conducive to different sorts of learning and includes facilities for different community groups.

Response

An in-school design laboratory was set up to help all members of the community that use Walker Technology College in Newcastle discover what they need from new buildings.

Result

Students, teachers, designers and the community of Walker Tech worked together to produce a brief for architects called ‘Dear Architect’. It includes drawings, photographs and illustrated scenarios to bring the school’s ideas to life.

Similarities with Cornwall

The key to this project was Dott’s design team working directly with the people who would be using the new facilities – in this case, the students and the teachers. Dott Cornwall’s Designing Communities [link] project works in a similar way with the residents of Pengegon.

In 2007 Walker Technology College in Newcastle received £13m funding from the government’s £70bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to renovate its buildings. Headteacher Steve Gater knows how big an opportunity this is. ‘The last thing we want to have with our BSF project is a new old school,’ he says. He wants a school that helps the 1,200 pupils get the most out of learning and fits into the community. That's where designers at Dott 07 came in.

Walker was built in the 1930s and is showing its age. The main buildings no longer suit the sort of teaching and learning that happen in the school. Kath Davidson, Head of Personalised Learning, says vocational learning is central to Walker’s offering. Old ways of teaching, where students sit in classrooms and learn from teachers and books, aren’t always the best way for them to work. As a process, Walker says vocational learning develops students who are independent thinkers, prepared for the world of work or higher education, organised, trustworthy and responsible, confident and mature and able to make their own career choices.

Just as vocational learning is a new way for pupils to work at school, it needs a new space, set up differently to a classroom. ‘At the moment, most vocational learning happens outside the school because there aren’t enough professional facilities on-site. For the students, vocational learning means working on-site with skilled staff as well as visiting neighbouring facilities for more appropriate training and instruction,’ says Davidson.

Students at Walker say changes need to be made. ‘It’s the same as when me Mum went there. When people come to play netball I’m embarrassed, and I want to feel proud about my school,’ says Latalia.

But how should it be changed? Deputy Head Mike Collier says: ‘We want to work in modern accommodation, take advantage of modern technologies and a broader vocational curriculum. But we have to be careful that we build new learning, not a new building with old learning practice. That’s the real challenge of BSF, transforming the learning experience.’

The process identifies the problem Walker needed to make sure it got value for money when it spent its £13m BSF allocation and that the money was targeted where it was needed most and where it would most benefit the school. Its first priority was to ask more than, ‘how should it look?’ It wanted to ask pupils and teachers what worked and didn’t in the current school. It wanted to know what they thought could and should work better in the future. This is where the designers helped out. They wanted to help Walker ask the right questions and involve the whole school in designing a better place to learn.

Julia Schaeper, from service design agency Engine, says: ‘Before you redesign a school building, it’s important to look at what goes on in school and to think about what school could – or should – be like for those who study and work in it as well as their families and others who live nearby. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with our co-design team.’

First, staff and pupils analysed every part of the school, from the site itself to the toilets, canteen, bike sheds and the playing fields, and judged how well they worked. Then, Engine focused on what the design priorities are when a school is rebuilt. The design team had to prioritise the concerns and problems that had been raised. Was disliking the school loos more or less important than finding it difficult to decide what to study at GCSE? Was wanting to learn from qualified professionals as well as teachers as important as wanting the canteen to look nicer? Could some strategic thinking be used to change how things worked rather than what they looked like?

Schaeper says: ‘The people at Walker were passionate and excited about the idea of working with a service design agency that would look at systems and processes first and at the building second. We built a co-design team and literally lived in the school for some time to understand it as an organism and as a system first in terms of processes: What are the different things and activities that go on inside a school? Who’s actually using it? Where are the problem areas? What are the little day-by-day jams that occur?’
Headteacher Steve Gater says: ‘At the moment we know we are constrained by the building itself but also by the traditions and some of the ways we do things, and working with Engine as a design group is enabling us to rethink and challenge the design status quo.’

The Response

While co-ordinating a design project to determine how their school should be refurbished, service design agency Engine encouraged the staff and students at Walker Technology College in Newcastle to go off site and look at examples of schools that did things differently.

The OurNewSchool team visited the Lifestyle Academy at Newcastle College, a training facility for beauty, sport, tourism and hospitality students.

A spa, gym, restaurant and hair & beauty salon are all open to the public, so students get to learn to do things in practice, rather than just in theory. The building also features a dedicated flight attendant training room and a purpose built biomechanics centre for the study of sports science.

For Walker, the Academy was an interesting and inspiring example of a dynamic learning environment where students interface with members of the public and where learning happens alongside commercial business activities. As an example of best practice, the team gathered information and photographs to show at a Senior Leadership meeting at Walker to challenge people’s thinking about the subject and stimulate further debate.

A visit to Dance City, a national dance agency training facility in Newcastle, also proved inspiring. Its manager described the effort that had gone into designing the social architecture of Dance City. The designers wanted to create a building that was welcoming and could accommodate a wide variety of people with an interest in dance.

The co-design team from Walker were given a behind-the-scenes tour of this learning and performance centre from the dressing rooms to the boiler room. They listed all the spaces, people, activities and things that together made up the experience at Dance City. They then compared what happened at Dance City with Walker and decided they needed to map what happened at Walker so they could decide what aspects of the school helped or made it difficult for students to learn.

Design process

After the visits, says Schaeper, the students, ‘came up with a huge range of opportunities and design challenges, which we then fed back to our co-design team. We then picked ones that affect the future of learning, learning styles, learning throughout the year, and throughout school life from year 7 to 14.’

The service design agency helped the school develop and use a series of tools to help their thinking and planning and to get people involved in solving problems and exploring opportunities. These included a group activity using a grid to list spaces, people, activities and objects in the school. Visualising the problem is a good first step, says the designers. After understanding how to deconstruct a space and critique it, the groups could identify problems that they hadn’t seen before and try to unravel why things worked the way they did and what had influenced the design decisions that somebody must have made to come up with the product in that format.

Having decided to look for a way to support and encourage useful learning at all stages of school life, the design team moved on to help the school team develop and refine their ideas into a final brief for an architect.

The Outcomes

The first design result was a visual map of a school pupil’s journey through their seven years at Walker and how they would like it to develop in the future. ‘My learning journey at Walker’ includes everything from subject selection and key talks with teachers to career decision crises and vocational learning turning points.

The team looked at what the journey would be like for a student starting at the school. What will students encounter, and how will they develop their independence? They designed and visualised the experience they wanted to create. The staff and students agree they’ll use it to ensure they keep developing their school.

A second result was a colourful illustrated brief which the designers helped staff and students to write for architects tasked with building the new school. Called Dear Architect, this brief presents what the school needs from its new buildings by describing its vision of future life at Walker through activities and experiences the school wants its students, staff and community to have. It maps out the processes it went through with OurNewSchool and describes how and why decisions were made. 


Together with the people from the school we designed a brief that says: “These are the things that we feel our school should take on, this is what we would like our school to be in the future” and looks at the interactions, the activities and the things that are going on from a process point of view that then informs a visual and physical design of the building.

Julia Schaeper from Engine

Key elements of Dear Architect include a description of The Works, a space for vocational learning where students can enjoy at least one full day of vocational training each week. This ties in with a transformed timetable that no longer conforms to traditional hour-long lesson blocks set for a whole year.

The new school will have a vocational learning block containing things like a working hair and beauty salon, where professionals could work and train the students. There could be a childcare facility where teachers would bring their toddlers so the students could learn to take care of them. A café and bistro would be attached to a catering department for students to learn about catering and prepare lunch for the school. This sort of facility could be used by the wider community, possibly for adult education evenings, and it would rely on the outside community coming in to share knowledge and skills.

Online learning support will also be important to Walker. It hopes to develop an online curriculum which the students can access using wireless technology in open spaces around the school with minimal supervision.

In Dear Architect, staff and students say that ‘staff and student well-being must be at the heart of the design.’ They hope that ‘the visualisation of our plans and ideas will help us all gain a shared understanding and spark more great creative conversations’ with the architects.

Supplied by The Design Council http://www.designcouncil.org.uk