Joined up services look to Joinedupdesign

At face value, the rationale for basing the design of prevention services on routine epidemiological studies of local child development needs fits easily alongside arguments in favor of a "community curriculum" to ground and humanize the UK's national curriculum requirement.

Local epidemiology and risk audit are features of US collaborative operating systems such as Communities that Care and Collective Efficacy, and of UK initiatives including the Birmingham Brighter Futures strategy.

The equivalent case for a community curriculum "which identifies particular local needs which the curriculum should address and the distinctive educational opportunities which the local community and environment provide" is part of the model for the 21st century school proposed by the The Cambridge Primary Review [1], whose final report is just published.

The Review, which has controversially described itself as “the most comprehensive inquiry into English primary education for 40 years” uses the term "communal sense" to frame its discussion of the school as a community in its own right, and as a focus for the wider community, where children's services can be "joined up".

Progress toward that degree of social cohesion has been "complex, slow and variable," the authors maintain. There has been a “lack of fit” between building design and function, which the UK Primary Capital Programme was intended to repair, but which the recession now threatens (and which, in any case, has been hardest to engineer in the very schools where it is most wanted).

Nevertheless, just as prevention science insists that information about local children's developmental needs should drive service design, so the Cambridge Review insists that children, as well as their teachers, should be involved in the design of the 21st century school.

The collaborative method highlighted in the Review is Joinedupdesignforschools [2] devised by the UK Sorrell Foundation. Set up in 1999 by the notable husband and wife corporate design partnership of John Sorrell and Frances Newell, it launched ten pilot projects with matched funding from the Department for Children, Families and Schools and celebrity support from fashion designer Paul Smith and architects Richard Rogers and Marks Barfield (London Eye).

The first results went on show at London's V&A Museum in 2005 and the pilot was scaled up. Around 100 schools and 10,000 pupils have since had contact with the scheme, which casts children in the role of clients, who work together to produce a brief the improve the quality of their school life. Architects or designers are appointed; a collaboration results.

In her account of the experience at Hythe Bay primary school, Kent headteacher Carolyn Chivers used language reminiscent of enthusiastic verdicts on social and emotional learning programs.

"This was the richest curriculum experience in years in this school," she said. "It worked on thinking skills and problem-solving skills, helped them articulate and developed their self-confidence. Every child in this school worked for long hours. The concentration had to be seen to be believed."

The upshot in Hythe Bay’s case was a £1.2m extension scheme. “Visitors arriving on a cold and grey winter's day are greeted with a wave of warmth and color as they step through the door,” The Guardian reported. “The walls are summer blue. The receptionist sits behind a desk fronted with planks of varnished wood that bring fishing boats to mind. The only casualty was a Barbie pink rubber floor – vetoed by the governors.

Among local authorities involved in the later wave of Joinedupdesign activity has been the London Borough of Camden, which has incorporated the exercise into its rendering of the national Building Schools for the Future [3] programme.

“We have been overwhelmed by the fresh energy and ideas generated by the students, which goes to show just why their involvement is crucial…”the Borough’s Executive Member for Schools, Andrew Mennear has said.

So, in the lifetime of The Sorrell Foundation, fueled by UK government agendas, enabling children to participate in school design has become enough of a growth industry to warrant its own academic conference.

Debate at a meeting in Coventry, last March, dealt with concerns ranging tellingly from “the intense hope and promise” being invested in the idea, to the “formidably complex and regulated nature of school redevelopment projects” to the “ambiguous nature of participation in practice”.

Ergonomic approaches were discussed (design based on the spatial interaction between child and adult bodies), but there was nothing on the agenda specifically about whether or not any of the relationships between architects, designers and children was being evaluated or experimentally trialed, and, if so, with what result.

But then, as Michelle Newman from the hosting Coventry Design and Ergonomics Applied Research Group pointed out in the preamble to her discussion of the stakeholder perspective, nor had there so far been any attempt to evaluate new primary school buildings from the perspective of their principal users.

Sorrell’s own evaluation of issues commonly raised by children during the Joinedupdesign program puts sheltered social spaces top of the list, followed by safe and hygienic toilets, civilized dinner halls and low carbon emissions. All very grownup.