School Design Matters

How School Design Relates to the Practice and Experience of Schooling

What this book really is

School Design Matters is a short but serious research book about school buildings and what they actually do in the life of a school. It does not treat a school building as a neutral container, but it also does not fall into the opposite mistake of assuming that architecture by itself transforms education. From the first chapter onward, the book insists that the real issue is the relationship between design and practice. That choice makes the book stronger than a simple pro-design or anti-design argument.

The book grows out of the Design Matters? project, a multi-disciplinary collaboration involving schools, architects, engineers, educationalists, and policymakers. The researchers studied new-build English secondary schools created in the early 2000s under the Building Schools for the Future initiative and the Academies Programme, alongside comparator schools in the same localities. Their focus was not only on design intentions, but on the lived experiences of teachers, students, and leaders over time.

The main argument

One of the most important things the book does is reject the lazy question “Does design matter?” as if the answer could be a simple yes or no. The authors argue that design and practice stand in a dynamic relationship. Buildings offer possibilities, invitations, constraints, and symbolic meanings, but they do not force one single educational outcome. That is why the same design can be used in very different ways under different leadership regimes and pedagogic assumptions.

This becomes the real intellectual center of the book. If school leaders, teachers, and students occupy a building in ways aligned with the design’s pedagogic assumptions, then the building may support new practices and strengthen social life. But if there is conflict between the original design and the dominant school culture, the same spaces can become frustrating, noisy, underused, or actively resented.

Why the early chapters matter

The first chapters are useful because they set up the problem carefully. The introduction explains that the project focused on how design influenced everyday school experience, especially for pupils moving from primary into secondary settings. Figure 1.1, the overall schema of the project, is especially useful because it shows that the researchers were following a chain from primary-school expectations, into design vision, into multiple later occupations of the same buildings, each with its own pedagogic practice and user perceptions. That schema quietly tells you the whole book’s story: design is never final because occupation changes.

The theoretical framing also matters. The authors draw on cultural-historical and semiotic ideas to argue that context is not just an external environment acting on passive individuals. School space is interpreted, inhabited, and socially produced. That is why one student can say of a newly built school, “this school is too posh for us.” The remark is small, but it captures a major point: design is always filtered through social identity, expectation, belonging, and culture.

The research method

The book’s method is one of its strongest features. The team used observations, interviews, documentary analysis, map tasks, nominal group techniques, essay tasks, photographs, and a modified school connectedness questionnaire. They followed cohorts from the end of Year 6 into Year 7 and beyond, and they also tracked how the same buildings were reinterpreted through leadership changes over time. That combination of approaches gives the book unusual depth for a study of school design.

This matters because the subject could easily have been handled too narrowly. A purely technical building-performance study would have missed the emotional and social life of the school. A purely anecdotal book would have missed the value of patterns and comparison. Here, the authors try to hold both together.

The strongest middle section

The chapters on design in practice and the experience of new-build schools appear to be the most revealing part of the book. One of the clearest findings is that students consistently care a great deal about social relations and social space. Before transition, students most often worry about friends, teachers, and the social life of the new school. After transition, what they value in the new secondary environment depends a great deal on the interaction between the design and the rules that structure its use.

This is where the case studies become especially powerful. In one school, where social spaces were available and leadership allowed freer use of them, students increasingly valued those spaces over time. In another, where rules progressively restricted movement and use of social areas, those same kinds of spaces became less meaningful. The point is not that one type of plan always works and another always fails. The point is that design-in-practice produces the real experience of school.

An especially vivid example appears in the discussion of open-plan learning areas. In one occupation of School C4, teachers and students complained that the lack of walls and doors created constant noise and distraction. A teacher said the other class’s sound hit her before it even reached the students; another said the space worked only when no one else was teaching nearby. Students described it as confusing and distracting. In that case, design and practice were in direct conflict, and makeshift adaptations only deepened the problem.

Yet the book does not simply conclude that open space is bad. Elsewhere it shows that some students spoke enthusiastically about seeing everything going on and enjoying brighter, more open environments. That contrast is one of the book’s best lessons: design cannot be judged in the abstract without asking what kind of schooling is actually taking place inside it.

School connectedness

The school connectedness chapter gives the book a stronger empirical spine. The authors use a modified connectedness scale to track students’ sense of fit, belonging, and psychological relation to school across time. One of the clearest findings is that connectedness tends to decline over time overall, which is consistent with broader literature, but that trajectories vary significantly between schools and school modalities.

The more interesting result is not the overall decline, but the variation. The book shows that design/practice alignment matters. Students in schools where design and practice were more aligned showed different patterns of connectedness from those in schools where design and practice were in conflict. The authors do not reduce connectedness to architecture alone, but they do show that space, rules, and school culture together shape how safe, social, and at-home students feel.

The final argument

The final chapter is where the book becomes clearest and, in some ways, strongest. The authors say explicitly that design and practice are mutually interactive, but that the primary driver is usually practice and the expectations attached to it. New leaders do not enter a school as blank slates; they bring educational priorities with them. The building then offers opportunities and restraints, but it does not automatically reverse those priorities.

This leads to one of the book’s smartest conclusions: one design may be perceived and used in very different ways in different practices of schooling. That is perhaps the single best sentence-level summary of the whole study. It explains why the authors dislike over-standardised answers, why they are wary of simplistic causal claims, and why they call for a richer form of post-occupancy evaluation.

The last pages are particularly good on this point. The book argues that traditional post-occupancy evaluation is too narrow because it focuses too heavily on easy-to-measure items like energy use. Those matter, but they do not capture whether a school becomes a place of belonging, whether spaces support or damage social relations, or whether the building can adapt as leadership and pedagogy change. The authors therefore call for a more social and cultural model of post-occupancy evaluation and even redefine sustainability in terms of a building’s ability to adapt to different forms of practice over time.

Final judgment

My judgment is strongly positive. This is a thoughtful and important short book because it takes a very visible subject—school buildings—and refuses the easy answers. It neither worships design nor dismisses it. Instead, it shows that the real issue is how design, pedagogy, leadership, and student life become woven together. That makes the book useful not only for architects, but for anyone serious about schooling.

Command Palette