CoReD – Collaborative ReDesign with Schools – “Getting together to change school space”.

Space matters to education. Research shows that physical spaces and material resources affect how teachers teach and students learn, ultimately impacting outcomes. This evidence base is now recognised by decision-makers, including national governments, the OECD and World Bank. What is being missed, however, is the vital contribution of educational practitioners to the total ‘learning environment’. Teachers are not always supported to use space most effectively to enhance student wellbeing and learning. Since there is no perfect educational space, the key to success is aligning uses and practices with the physical setting. To achieve this match, collaborative design is required, bringing together values, needs and pedagogical intentions, when planning new educational premises, but also when adjusting the arrangement or use of existing spaces. CoReD was needed to fill these gaps in provision for educational professionals and to support the development of spatial solutions, enabling practitioners to share good practice locally and communicate resulting expertise more widely. Guidance and tools were needed to enable practitioners to contribute to the development of ‘environmental competence’ in their own school and beyond.

Objectives

The main aim was to give education practitioners the means to engage effectively with their own settings and practices to improve fit between teaching, learning and space, and to communicate the results to a global audience. The intention was to inform educationors of the evidence relating to school space so they could understand their own role, while providing them with resources to work collaboratively in their own settings to improve practice. The CoReD tools were key to the project’s success. They needed to be sufficiently structured for a practitioner to pick up and use, but flexible enough to adjust for all design stages and educational settings. The project activities developed the tools, trialling them to inform adjustment, and produced other resources, based on the results. This process was also intended to contribute to local partnerships with practitioners, school leaders and municipal decision-makers to outlive the project. A final aim, looking to the legacy of the project, was that the outputs would continue to be freely available on a well-designed and maintained website to share knowledge and good practice in the use of space with national and international practitioners, pedagogic leaders and policy-makers.