Conclusion: Telling the Quiet Stories of Educational Design

Certainly, the view of the child in school has changed over the past half century and alongside that change has come about a reductive determination of how a school might be designed and education experienced.

The reasons for this are threefold. First, there has been a profound shift since the 1970s in the means by which we identify the characteristics of a successful school. Today, standard test scores monitored and inspected and publicized have placed school communities under enormous pressure to prove their academic standing broadcast via various forms of league tables. Second, in Britain, since the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974), and around the world there has arisen a new scenario of perceived risk in school environments that has had profound effects on the relationship between adults and children and their freedom of movement within the building and between the inside and outside. Third, the introduction of web-based technologies in schools has become one of the most powerful determinants of how spaces are planned and utilized for teaching and learning. Equipment overload has become a familiar scenario as schools have become places employing much larger numbers of adults than in the past whose equipment require ever more spaces for storage. In addition, in the UK for several decades since the demise of HMI there has no longer been available a clearly articulated view of best practice within the public sector that recognizes the value of teachers’ freedom to experiment, improvise, learn from their own practice and share knowledge with others through regular extended in-service training. The latter fundamentally collective activity, that saw its most full articulation at the summer schools organized for serving teachers at Dartington Hall and Woolley Hall during the 1960s, have been replaced by an emphasis on individualized personal professional advancement through the acquisition of higher-level degree qualifications.

The first of these three factors has led to a retreat from the celebration of informal learning associated with the 1960s and 1970s that complimented John Holt’s assertion that true learning was something that defied measurement. In its place, there has been a strong recognition that children and young people do indeed learn much informally and that in doing so they are strongly motivated and capable of deep penetration of existing knowledge about subject that interest them. However, an overriding concern with meeting the requirements of national curriculum and standardized targets has made for a situation where no matter how much teachers might want to follow where children’s interests lead, they often fear the consequences for their school and their careers.

Over time, mainstream educational thinking and practice has not travelled consistently along the progressive path as predictably as the architects and educators in the past had envisaged. But this is not a straightforward story where child-centred practice has given way to traditional didactics. There is a continued concern with the interests of the child or young person at the heart of the educational process but this is understood and articulated in altered terms via the use of a very different vocabulary compared with that made common in the post war period.

These factors have impacted on schools designed in the past that are still operating today and have influenced the rearrangement of their use of spaces as well as, in some cases, their major redesigns. These same factors are also powerfully shaping new schools designed today in the UK, Europe and beyond. The challenge for educators and teachers is to not lose sight of the value of Mary Crowley’s ingredients in addressing these newer concerns and if possible through addressing them, enhance their suitability for a education fit for the twenty-first century. In doing so, they are likely to arrive at the ingredient that links the post war period of political optimism with the present concern to strengthen meaning and practice of democracy: the future-building school.

This book has been a study of education and architecture and the relationship between these constructs as viewed through the study of one life. Mary Crowley trained as an architect and qualified as one of the best and most promising of her generation. She was restless as a student and as a newly qualified practitioner until she found her place and her purpose which was through education.

Mary Crowley’s architectural knowledge was shaped by the rise of Modernism and the buildings that she is most strongly associated with such as the three houses at Tewin and the primary schools designed at the height of her influence at the Ministry of Education can be associated with that movement’s clean lines, functional intent and simplicity. However, there was a more powerful motive than Modernism at work in Mary’s legacy which is a spirit that she took from her family origins that emerged time and again in various places and that was associated with a form of honesty and straightforwardness in living and working in the service of communities.

That same spirit is captured in a commentary on Crow Island School, Winnetka,

The school must be honest and obvious to children as to its structure, its purpose, its use, its possibilities. Strength shall be evident, blemishes shall be visible, materials shall say, things are as they seem, and struggle – because life is a struggle – must be manifest in some way.¹

The same spirit is manifest in all that Mary Crowley appreciated about the purposefulness of Scandinavian design where beauty was arrived at through a celebration of raw materials unadorned and offering themselves to be admired.

Therefore, it could be suggested that architects today might not be far off the mark if they adhere to the following principles in creating buildings that support technologies both high and low that recognize,

1. the infinite variety – in children’s ways of being, in ways of learning and in materials used;

2. the natural energy and exuberance of children;

3. confidence and friendliness in school-based relationships;

4. an atmosphere of informality in lessons;

5. the blurring of divisions between adult and child; age groups of learners; parts of the school day; the inside and outside; and between subjects of the curriculum;

6. a pedagogy that allows children to take elements of their learning from start to finish without interruption, ‘to seize the opportunity and catch the moment’;

7. where moving from place to place is intended to be a pleasant experience;

8. where no two learning spaces looked the same and there is a range and variety of spaces provided to reflect as far as possible the range and variety in children;

9. permitting of deep and lasting ‘first hand’ experience;

10. where ‘opt out’ spaces are provided where children can be quiet if they choose to;

11. where the views out of the school are as pleasurable as possible;

12. where storage is integrated in furnishings and fittings to cater for the capacities of children and their teachers;

13. where children are comfortable and can move easily from place to place and where there is a continual flow of bodies from one activity to another supported by a team of teachers working cooperatively;

14. where children have their own work space with their materials to hand, where they have their own home bay with toilet and cloakroom close by;

15. where all spaces are utilized as learning and teaching spaces including halls, corridors and outside areas (often covered with verandas);

16. where living things flourish including school pets, plants, trees and gardens.

Indeed, this set of design principles and values might well have designed the school of 2035 that we explored with Keri Facer above. They were set out, however, by Christian Schiller, Senior Inspector for Primary Education in England and Wales half a century ago. This only can strengthen our resolve to recognize and respect the views of children and young people and listen to their voices in designing for education since they chime with resonant voices from the past and realize, often before many of their elders are capable of, futures of learning.

NOTES

1 Mary’s hand written copy of Architecture Forum (1941). Crow Island School.