Built policy: school-building and architecture as policy instrument

ABSTRACT

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• policy
• schools
• school-building
• built policy

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant SAS-2016-023. Emma Dyer, Neil Selwyn and two anonymous reviewers gave very helpful feedback on earlier versions of the paper. The Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Florence and the Faculty of Education at Monash University provided hospitality as a visiting scholar – my deep gratitude to Leonardo Chiesi (Florence) and Neil Selwyn (Melbourne) for making it possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This and all other non-English publications are my translations.

2. The material-semiotic distinction also helps to identify how architecture is principally being used to organize space in a particular case, i.e., whether by materially constraining and enabling (e.g. through the physical impassibility of walls or the vertical support and division by floors) or mainly semiotic (e.g. a change in colour, lighting or orientation of chairs and desks). In reality, any material in social use is working both physically and semiotically: ‘Meaning needs matter to realize it; at the same time, matter needs meaning to organize it … The balance between the two is constantly shifting’ (Halliday 2003, 3).

3. An exception proving the rule is the intentional use of ‘innovative’ aesthetic forms, colours, internal design – atypical features – to signal that something different is happening as with the early Academy buildings in England: they ‘literally stand for and represent, in their buildings and infrastructure, new, bold and different thinking – more of the dynamic rhetoric of New Labour’ (Ball 2007, 172; see also Uduku’s (2000) argument on the use of Western educational architecture in colonizing spatial and educational imaginaries and realities in West Africa).

4. Similar, non-English shifts exist too although perhaps more technical in usage, e.g., aula > spazio di apprendimento (in Italian) and aula/salón de clases > espacio/ambiente de aprendizaje (in Spanish). My thanks to Paula Cardellino for the Spanish example.

5. The backstory could, of course, be extended – why schools are closed (as the predecessor to PTA was) is an important issue I discuss later.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [SAS-2016-023].

Notes on contributors

Adam Wood

During 2017–19, Adam Wood is funded by the Leverhulme Trust as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy and Monash University, Australia to research contemporary school design. His main interests are the conceptions of space that are mobilized in school architecture and their implications both for people’s work and for education itself. He co-edits architectureandeducation.org