Sponsored
Are you over the age of 40? If so, you can remember the archetypal “corridors and classrooms” learning arrangement that hasn’t changed since about 1851. This was when Dickens was busy publishing “Hard Times” and Mr Gradgrind was insisting that school was all about “facts, facts, facts”.
Well, school should now be a lot more than “facts” – you can get these from Google – so school really should go a lot further than facts.
In fact – pardon the pun – what is the rationale of the school? If most content and most facts needed for GCSEs and A-levels are available online, why should children go to school?
It’s a question the UK has grappled with and, apart from a few exceptional luminaries, mostly failed to answer. Children still go to school to environments that mostly look as they did 150 years ago and to have facts mostly cascaded into their learning.
“It’s clear that educational provision is cognitively dissonant.”
Knowledge creation is mostly absent from the curriculum and the learning spaces dictate the pedagogy, which is nonsense, as the spaces are the one facet of educational provision which we have 100 per cent control over. Yet we don’t change them. Why?
It’s clear that educational provision is cognitively dissonant. We know that our traditional spaces are no longer effective: acoustics, optics, texture and lack of flexible functionality mitigate against knowledge creation, collaboration, personal learning and problem-solving. Yet, we continue to use them.
Politically, the DfE has no metrics to evaluate wellbeing and academic performance once pupils have occupied a building, which tells us that as a nation, we are creating buildings, not schools. And there is a significant difference between the two.
Hence the cognitive dissonance between what we know schools should be and the buildings which we currently is probably explained by political direction and national apathy.
“Children are anything but standardised when it comes to their learning needs.”
Politically, our country is governed by mostly neurotypical learners who probably thrived in a standardised environment, hence Mr Gove’s insistence on standardised buildings and a standardised allowance of space per child.
Yet children are anything but standardised when it comes to their learning needs. Post-Covid, the number of sensorily hypersensitive children has rocketed, as has the number of neurodivergent children. These learners need carefully zoned environments which allow them to regulate their behaviour and engage with their learning.
None of this is rocket science. Learners with a broader and more diverse range of sensory and cognitive needs require spaces which “speak” to their needs. If not, the space naturally excludes them, which is why so many children struggle with behaviour and performance at school.
“How can a child have a healthy relationship in a space where they can’t hear themselves think?”
So, if learning spaces were sensorily zoned to mirror children’s needs by optimising light, acoustics (the hidden driver for learning), texture and biophilia (lots of natural patterning) along with flexible furniture provision that is ergonomically appropriate, children’s self-esteem would improve. So would their comfort and, most importantly, they would literally be in a position to create healthy relationships.
How can a child have a healthy relationship in a space where they can’t hear themselves or their peers think, where they can’t physically move to engage emotionally with a peer or a teacher and where the light looks like a secret service interrogation room? The answer is; they can’t.
We are biologically reactive beings and respond first and foremost to changes in the environment, so if we want children to have healthy relationships, we begin by changing their learning spaces.