School Environment 1

I am very firmly of the view that the physical environment plays a significant role in how people... pupils, staff, other stakeholders and visitors perceive a school.  Outstanding schools are rarely junk-cluttered and dirty environments.  'Challenged' schools sometimes are.  

Where there is evident love, care and attention to detail there is often a good school.

Where there are smelly toilets in a school... there are often other issues.

Why are there smelly toilets in some schools?  It's not inevitable.  It is a choice that someone has allowed to happen.  And what kind of toilets would you be happy using...... but that's another blog posting, perhaps.  
http://www.bog-standard.org/

Quality of the environment is always something that has been very important to me as a School Leader.  It is always a choice.  In England, we have the most devolved School Leadership system in the world, so we have the most control over budgets.  

I very much see school environment as an ongoing and evolving mission.

Reproduced from The Schools Network, 'The Primary Network', Issuse 16, January 2012

"Robin Hood was inspected in April 2011 and was judged to be an outstanding school. On one level, the inspectors were telling us what we already knew, on another it was the affirmation that we needed to help spur us on to the next phase of development.

I was very keen to mark this new phase of development in an emphatic way. Governors and I had taken a Learning Walk around the school some months earlier and had identified some areas that, despite the bright paintwork and beautiful displays of children’s work on the walls, we felt didn’t quite convey the ethos and values - the message of the school in the way that we wanted. I am a great believer in the power of a building – a school in particular – to influence the people within it. I am very much of the view that a beautiful school environment is an essential part of the ‘outstanding jigsaw’.

So the conversation with Governors set me thinking.

The ofsted visit in April, alongside the need to redecorate the school hall during the summer gave me further impetus. I was keen to mark our next development phase with a bold statement of intent. I have always thought that primary schools should be text-rich environments. I wanted to represent the attitudes, values and ethos of the school physically – designed into the decorative scheme. Design and physicality were important to me as that’s where I felt that we would achieve the impact for the pupils, community and staff.

As luck, or serendipity, or fate, would have it, I received an email from Yvonne Thurley Design. Yvonne was already working with schools on design concepts.

Yvonne Thurley writes:

‘My first meeting with Mark was truly inspiring! His passion, energy and desire to visually demonstrate to a high standard what the school is all about was infectious.

My starting point was looking at the current school tree logo and the large space where Mark wanted to create a real impact. It was fundamental that we built upon what the school already had in place visually to develop it further and to ensure it linked well.

We wanted to keep it simple but dramatic – the hall space allowed the large scale designs to be installed, so creating that real WOW factor. Adding in more greens, greys and silver worked extremely well and the colours of the tree trunk were also introduced to maintain consistency. The text trees came about due to Mark’s vision of a text rich design and the quotations chosen were those we felt were most powerful from Mark’s great collection - they work really well. The wording was extremely important, aiming to inspire and motivate the children on a daily basis. These designs not only have an effect on the children’s minds and attitude; they also make them feel valued within their school environment.’

We involved children, staff and Governors in choosing the words and phrases that now have pride of place on our walls. The quotations come from my Quotes of the week – which have been appearing on the staff notice board every week for the past six years now, and from the song that our children come into the hall to every Celebration assembly ‘What have you done today to make you feel proud?’ Working with a professional designer was a fantastic experience and was 100% the right decision. Yvonne’s ideas and imagination brought the scheme alive. Basing the whole design scheme around the circle at the centre of the school logo was a brilliant insight that has given us a very simple but incredibly rich visual identity.

The reaction of the pupils when they first entered the hall after the summer break was incredible. There was a collective intake of breath which seemed to last for several minutes. The same was true when staff first saw the design and when parents joined us for the first Celebration assembly of the new school year.

Now, several weeks in, the children are, of course, very used to it. The design around them is part of their environment, part of what they expect of the school. There is a clear visual identity that says to me ‘We are proud of what we are and are confident about our place in the world’ exactly how we want our children to feel about themselves.

Our children talk about themselves as being special. They recognise that they belong to a special community and are proud to do so. The words and messages and quotes, and the shapes and the colours, are part of their identity, and are part of the glue that binds us as a community. The next phase of our journey together will be incredibly exciting and will be powered by shared values, a shared belief and great design."