More than a survey: an interdisciplinary post-occupancy tracking of BER schools

Abstract

In February 2009, the Australian Government announced the $16.2b Building the Education Revolution (BER) as part of an economic stimulus package. In the context of a global financial crisis, the Government called for ‘shovel ready’ projects requiring state education departments to develop template designs to speed the delivery process. Three years later, new facilities have been completed in over 1100 government schools in Victoria (DEECD, 2012). This article outlines research by an interdisciplinary team to track the early occupation of a template design used in Victoria. The design template was unusual: it enabled schools to continue using traditional classroom teaching or to slide open walls to form larger neighbourhoods suitable for team teaching. Our research linked different methodological frameworks to undertake post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of the new spaces. POE strategies are often driven by construction and project management perspectives rather than focus on organizational issues and user behaviour.

Keywords:

• evaluating school designs
• multidisciplinary research
• pedagogy and space
• post-occupancy evaluation
• sustainable school design

Acknowledgements

This research was supported with a 2010 Seed Grant from the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne. This article describes issues around the occupation of the new spaces by teachers and students as observed by Clare Newton, Sue Wilks, Dianne Chambers and Kenn Fisher. Lu Aye, Robert Crawford, Dominique Hes and Toong-Khuan Chan explored sustainability and indoor occupant comfort issues. The factors affecting life-cycle costing were researched by Ajibade Aibinu. Kate Goodwin and Christopher Jenson provided research assistance.