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at the summer schools organized for serving teachers at Dartington Hall and Woolley Hall during the 1960s, have been replaced by an emphasis on individualized personal professional advancement through the acquisition of higher-level degree qualifications.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.