Consulting the school

• Further resources

Ashton Park - an example of staff and student consultation around BSF

Website

www.ashtonpark.co.uk

Key challenges:

• Can we design spaces that would give learners more choice over what they learn and who they learn with and from?
• How do we consult with pupils, families, staff and the wider community to identify their priorities and the school's needs?
• What sort of learning relationships do we want to foster?

Overview:

As part of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project, Futurelab worked with staff, teachers and students of all ages at Ashton Park Secondary School, Bristol, to come up with a design brief.

The aim was to involve stakeholders in the BSF process and help them to identify and prioritise important aspects about their learning environment - and where possible what could be improved.

Approach:

The following activities were designed for the less articulate, so did not involve a great deal of writing. Instead, facilitators wrote up the discussions.

Wall of What Works

To encourage free thinking, everyone was asked to help fill a wall with post-it notes detailing all the things that work well about the school itself and its environment.

These were sorted into categories or themes e.g. those describing the atmosphere and ethos of the school, those praising particular facilities (e.g. drama studio and sports facilities), or those referring to educational approaches perceived as successful.

Image Sift

The groups - comprising staff, students and other adults - were given a set of images of classrooms and school buildings, including: Victorian classrooms with children sitting in rows of pews, ultra-modern glass domes, lecture theatres, messy primary school rooms and contemporary secondary school rooms.

Each group agreed on an image that they found especially appealing, and completed a sheet detailing why they thought so. They were also asked to cut up different images to create a "collage" of appealing features.

Photo Tour

The Photo Tour involved providing each group with a digital camera and a small set of cards. The cards described different parts of a school environment: "play/relaxing spaces," "eating spaces," "transition spaces," "specialist areas," "large group spaces" and "small group spaces," "personal spaces," "display spaces," and "exercise spaces."

Each group took a few cards and went looking for these spaces around the school, before returning to the main group and describing what they had found that was either appealing or in need of rethinking during redesign.

Card Sort

The final activity was based on the Schools Power League choices which were printed out as cards. The cards included day-to-day things like personal lockers and toilets as well as things concerned with extending learning, such as linking to external experts and having access to learning resources at home via the internet.

In pairs, participants sorted the cards by placing two of them side by side, choosing the one perceived as having priority and eliminating the remainder. Participants went through four rounds of elimination before arriving at a set of around 10 cards that they agreed were amongst the top priorities for consideration during redesign. They then discussed their choices with the other pairs to agree the top 10.

The sessions highlighted the following areas that may be worth discussing in other schools:

• The importance of adaptable environments where different sorts of teaching and learning activities can take place.
• Learning from effective building design already on site.
• The balance of functionality with a sense of "activeness".
• The importance of storage: metal lockers are often inappropriate as they clutter corridors and get damaged.
• Ownership of space by both teachers and students.
• Creating space to promote relaxation and socialisation as well as activity and spontaneity.
• The need for "private space" in classrooms even if it's just being able to drag a desk away from the centre.
• Participants thought of their school as a community, and that all decisions about its future should be discussed within that community; not just by a leadership team.

Key points and recommendations:

• Seek the views of a representative sample of students - not just the articulate.
• The consultation should be with all stakeholders, and regularly.
• Share with all staff a clear vision of how teaching and learning may change in coming years and how this will impact on the space in which they work.
• Ensure that all staff are aware of the various stages of the BSF programme and are able to feed back on these designs. It may be useful for key members of the consultation to act as contact points.
• The Be prepared future trends gallery could be used to encourage opinions.

Wall of What Works Ashton Park image sorting Power League cards