Editorial

The papers in this Special Issue were first presented at the Access and Integration in Schools Conference in December 2007, held at Coventry School of Art and Design, UK. The annual conference has been designed to address the need to recognise the value that ergonomics, or the taking of a more person‐centred approach might have in reducing the problems in schools and in enhancing their future design.

Ergonomists have not, on the whole, concerned themselves with the design of school environments, despite the notable success of employing ergonomics to the study of other work environments. Instead, where they have chosen to consider teaching- and learning-related issues, these have most commonly addressed issues such as the design of furniture, backpacks and the use of computers. Indeed, several of the papers presented at the conference addressed these and similar issues. However, such studies tend to focus on designing for children, rather than designing with, and by, children, which are more in keeping with the themes of this publication. Four papers have been selected for this publication. They represent different facets of pupil involvement in the design of schools in the UK.

Pupil-centred design is, in itself, beginning to achieve some recognition within the ergonomics community. Two generic models have been presented (Benedyk et al. 2006, in press; Smith 2007), both of which put the learner at the heart of the process, and seek to understand the factors which might contribute to the success of learning interactions. Such models point to the need for designers to take into account a wider set of factors when designing learning environments and teaching material rather than just the immediate focus of interaction. Such an approach was undertaken in the design of polysensory classrooms for children with an autistic spectrum disorder (see Woodcock and Georgiou 2007; Woodcock et al. in press), where the design of a low sensory room took into account not just the immediate needs of the child (in terms of interaction with the screen) but also how the room would function within the wider school context, the training that teachers would require to use it, how the activities in the room would integrate with other lessons, etc.

Although these models point to the need to understand children as pupils, they do not consider whether pupils should be engaged in the design of school environments, the level or manner of such an engagement or how the results of pupil participation might feed into the design processes. The papers presented in this edition start to address these issues with regard to the new schools programme in the UK.

Such questions are timely. The UK has embarked on an ambitious plan to redesign and refurbish its primary and secondary schools. Governmental reviews have criticised some existing schools as being unfit for purpose, with some of the building stock dating back to Victorian times, there is a clear need for building renewal. Some existing schools do not support new technology, new teaching methods, the enlarged curriculum or the needs of pupils with different backgrounds, interests and abilities. Given the £21.9 billion investment in new secondary schools, it is vital that the schools that are currently being designed will increase staff and student satisfaction and provide safe, pleasurable, efficient and effective working environments long into the future. Although the government has recognised the need for pupil engagement as part of this process, and made it a requirement of approval processes, it has not specified how such engagement should take place.

Engaging children in the design of future schools should be of potential interest not only to educators, policy-makers and the architects and designers directly involved in the building process, but to design researchers as well, for two reasons. Firstly, the new build programme represents a unique opportunity to involve children, first-hand, in real design activities that are central to their experience. It may be argued that providing meaningful engagement of children in such design related activities could provide them with an appetite for design which could inspire the next generation of designers. Secondly, working with children may lead to the development of new levels of understanding about design – for example, in terms of different ways of developing design briefs, engagement, and the representation of design solutions.

The policy-makers responsible for the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme and similar initiatives believe in the benefits of user-centred design. They actively encourage pupil participation from the earliest stages of the planning process, providing a clear mandate and encouragement for the involvement of children. Whilst most designers would aspire to some levels of user engagement, here there is positive encouragement to provide opportunities for consultation with young stakeholders in the belief that this will lead to more satisfactory design solutions and commitment to the concepts. Designers of even small-scale projects know that such non-tokenistic engagement is complex – requiring time, the development of dialogues, trust, envisioning, empowerment and negotiation. The paper by den Besten, Horton and Kraftl provides an insight into this complex and lengthy procedure rebuilding requires.

Together, the papers in this edition provide a contemporary account of how pupil participation in school design is taking place, the lessons that are being learnt, and the issues which need to be resolved if pupil engagement is to have the long-lasting and far reaching effects originally envisioned.

The paper by den Besten, Horton and Kraftl commences with an examination of the policy documents which state the requirement for pupil participation. These state that the user's experience should be at the heart of the process, where it is central to the success of building projects, and will encourage greater use of the building, develop trust between all parties and add to the feeling of community and ownership. Pupil participation is seen as ‘transformative, regenerative and innovative in itself, as well as likely to produce transformative, regenerative and innovative outcomes’. However, no guidelines are provided in the documents about how such participation should occur – one of the arguments being that the nature of participation depends on the local context.

Using 15 interviews with those in Local Authorities (LAs) responsible for school rebuilding and refurbishment, the team gathered a picture of how pupil participation was being conducted across the UK, finding that although LAs were optimistic about the idea of participation and its benefits, they were disappointed with it in practice; the extent of the participation was foreclosed by the complexities of the redesign process; that pupils contributions were local, contingent and modest – with their involvement compromised by their ability and interests and the manner in which they were involved.

A similar picture emerges from the paper by Parnell, Cave and Torrington, ‘School design: opportunities through collaboration’. Interviews were again undertaken, though this time with a wider range of stakeholders – architects, facilitators and building contractors involved in the school design process – to determine the ‘range of opportunities aris(ing) from the particular mix of different processes, professions and people involved in the school design and their potential interactions’. The emerging themes have been synthesised to form an outline model of opportunity in school design collaboration.

Ghaziani's paper, ‘Children's voices: raised issues for school design’, is based on an analysis of previous UK initiatives to find out what children would change in their schools – ‘The School I'd Like’, ‘Joinedupdesignforschools’, and the ‘Young Design Programme’. The retrospective analysis of these studies shows that children think of their schools in terms of the activities it supports (such as play and formal learning) and that each of these has a set of needs associated with it. Interesting are the different ways that students expressed their design ideas (through drawings and models) and the ways in which they were engaged in the design process (through site visits, etc.). The results confirm the view that ‘pupils know a tremendous amount about their school environment and that they can provide extremely important information for school designers’. The paper includes a list of design issues and a checklist which should be considered in the redesign and refurbishment of schools.

The last paper included is a case study by Newman and Thomas documenting the approach developed by one secondary school to engage students in the Building Schools for the Future process using a ‘design your school’ conference, the Personal, Social and Health Education curriculum and school councils. Like many schools studied in the AHRC-funded project on pupil participation in school design, the school was provided with little guidance on how to involve pupils in a meaningful dialogue about school design. However, the commitment of the staff to the participation agenda led to pupils' active engagement at the earliest stages. The benefits of staff and student involvement included raising awareness of design issues, conversations about student needs, and raising the self-esteem of students with special needs through their involvement as experts. However, given the long lead time until the school build, it is not clear whether any of the students will be around to see the realisation of their ideas. As the other papers have indicated, the complexity of the BSF process is daunting, and it is difficult to judge how much complexity students can deal with. In this school, the students were able to deal with some levels of complexity; however, more guidance about the process, and where the children's views would eventually be heard, was needed.

In conclusion, the investment by the UK government represents a very real potential to revitalise school environments. The commitment to pupil participation from the earliest stages is to be applauded, and provides many opportunities for young people to become part of the process. However, the research clearly identifies gaps in the support for schools, teachers, architects and designers who have been left with little guidance on how to organise and conduct meaningful participation. Without such guidelines pupils will not gain the true benefits from participating in design, their voices will be lost in larger-scale planning meetings and they may only be provided with limited opportunities to effect change. Such guidelines and tools for pupil (and teacher and wider stakeholder) involvement have to be developed urgently, to inform the next phase of the BSF programme so that learning environments can be developed which support innovative, interesting and challenging curriculae whilst enabling every child to achieve their full potential and letting them see that they have had an impact on design decisions.