CoReD - Collaborative Re-Design with Schools "Getting together to change school space" Research shows that well-designed learning spaces can impact on the wellbeing, engagement and attainment of learners, and provide pivotal support for school level change. It also demonstrates the impact of raising educators’ awareness of school space, so that they can adjust their setting or their practices. Meanwhile, across Europe, new schools are being designed and built, and older ones are being refurbished or redesigned. If this is to succeed in creating more innovative and inclusive spaces for pupils’ learning, we need education professionals to appreciate the impact of school space and be enabled to contribute in an informed way to discussions. Their contribution could, and should, range from evaluating their own classroom or school space, to changing local space and practice, through to engaging with national policy agendas relevant to school premises. There is an imperative to produce a coherent understanding that can support practice and policy into the future, empowering teachers and school leaders internationally to develop as ‘agents of change contributing to school development.’ (ET 2020 Working Group Schools 2016-18:10) The overarching aim of this project is to undertake activities and develop resources that will result in increased understanding of educational environments, firstly by education professionals within their own contexts, but subsequently more widely, influencing local and national debates and policy. The project activities and outputs will support teachers and school leaders to engage more effectively with their learning environment, empowering them in decisions made about facilities, material resources and digital provision. We intend to alter the conversation about school premises through making policy-makers, architects and designers, and teacher educators more aware of how users and space interact, including the active role of the spatially aware education professional. The key objectives of the project are as follows: • The provision of user-friendly, online tools that will enable education practitioners to evaluate and understand their current school learning environment and how it supports/impedes learning and teaching. • The development of online tools to enable education practitioners to determine the changes that need to be made in order to support their current practices more effectively or to help them develop more innovative and inclusive learning and teaching experiences for their pupils. • The creation of online case studies and guides that will chart the journey and experiences of practitioners in diverse settings as they use the tools to explore and understand their school learning environments. • The creation of a website to host the resources that will be developed collaboratively and iteratively by the university partners, the education practitioners and web designers, to be shared and disseminated via a range of social media. The six project partners have devised general approaches and specific methods for use in their own research when working with teachers, school leaders and students to develop their school learning environments. The aim now is to develop internationally trialled resources, which can be used by the teaching profession as freely-available, stand-alone tools that do not need to be implemented or analysed by university researchers. This aim will be achieved through collaborative work between the project partners and education professionals, trialling the tools across six diverse European countries. The resulting tools, case studies and practitioner guides will be translated into a range of languages to maximise international inclusivity. The creation of an open-access website linked to carefully chosen media will direct education practitioners and policy-makers to this resource ensuring that the project outputs remain widely available. This will drive improvements in education through supporting teachers and school leaders to understand the implications of the learning environment for their pupils and their pedagogy, and so undertake informed change.
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.
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.