Valuing Urban Schools as Social Infrastructure

Abstract

Re-thinking urban schools as part of an integral network of social infrastructure in cities presents new opportunities for mixed-use educational spaces at the heart of urban development. Yet these opportunities to leverage school assets to better integrate with, and enhance, their localities are often being missed. This chapter explores the value that schools can offer, not just for children, but for wider neighbourhood residents. While understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, we report on a research project to produce a social infrastructure framework which can be included in schools’ policy, implementation and evaluation measures. Developed through an engagement process with key stakeholders, and focused on England, we propose principles for enabling schools to provide better local social infrastructure; based on broadening how we value schools; taking a long-term view; using joined-up thinking; enabling schools to deliver community support; and designing in community potential from the start. This chapter discusses the implications of each principle, supported by examples.

Introduction

While the primary purpose of schools must remain the education of children and young people, limiting the vision of these significant public assets is negating valuable possibilities, particularly within emerging and existing urban centres where social infrastructure is often limited. Many schools in the United Kingdom (UK) are publicly funded, often with significant land and spatial requirements. To ensure that these assets reach their potential and enhance opportunities for local people, it’s vital that a wider understanding of community value is included in policy, implementation and evaluation measures, and that these community values are key considerations in planning application criteria. This is about what has been called ‘civicness’ or schools as civic places—but also about equality of opportunity and inclusion. Through re-thinking their value to a wider community, schools may become much more than just a building, conceptualised instead as enabling and integrating a set of social interactions and processes (Ralls, 2019).

The opening of school facilities for community use may seem obvious—and there are many schools which do this well—yet, in England, these wider social missions have been progressively limited by an increasing education and estates policy focus on standards, employability and individualised understandings of educational purpose, centred on personal academic achievement. When this is combined with austerity measures that affect not just schools’ budgets, but which have forced the closure of libraries, swimming pools and adult learning centres, the combined effects can be significant. In parallel, current means for commissioning and procuring schools in new developments often results in complex tensions between central government, local authorities and school operators dependent on a range of governance and funding frameworks. This can be a barrier to schools as integrated social infrastructure—and to fresh thinking that goes beyond the basic rental of school facilities for community use.

This chapter focuses on England—educational policies and practices vary across the UK—and is based on research undertaken to scope challenges and opportunities for rethinking the value of schools to their localities in an urban context. This was done through a series of discussion seminars with a range of stakeholders involved in the design, procurement, policy, and operations of schools. Following some shared editing, this led to the production of a discussion paper, Educating the City: Urban Schools as Social Infrastructure (Boys & Jeffery, 2020). This examined the problems and possibilities of schools as community assets in the English urban context. Five key values for existing and new schools were discussed to inform educational policy and built estate provision; and are outlined below. We then go on to discuss some of the significant challenges and barriers, and opportunities presented if these barriers can be overcome, towards a collective re-thinking of schools as social infrastructure in cities.

Broadening How We Value Schools

In this section, we outline five main ways in which schools can better provide social infrastructure. This starts from the simple and already common offering of community facilities and services. But it’s also about potentially offering education to learners who are not just the children who attend the school; enabling community involvement in school activities; supporting environmental sustainability; and becoming a catalyst for urban regeneration and socially sustainable mixed development.

Community Facilities and Services

School buildings, their contents and grounds, often represent the largest single asset for their immediate locality—where sports halls, playgrounds, meeting rooms, libraries and classrooms can also offer vital community spaces. In addition, schools can (and often do) offer access to services and equipment, and/or provide hubs (permanent or temporary) for community social care programmes, including parenting support, childcare, breakfast and after-school clubs. Sometimes other facilities are co-located with schools, often requiring little more than space and ease of access. The provision of such spaces can make a significant impact on local communities; both through the availability of these important social services as well as creating a sense of community pride around the school through shared interest and use.

There is good international evidence that using school facilities to provide community-based services can have positive impacts on a range of outcomes for children, families and communities. Bringing services together on a single site can generate a cumulative ‘community school effect’, help address child poverty, and solve some of the challenges posed by declining budgets for community services. (Dyson & Kerr, 2016, p. 2)

In the UK, sadly the utilisation of school buildings can be less than 30% of their useful lives (Wallbridge, in press). This is neither economically, spatially nor environmentally sensible.

Life-Long Learning Opportunities

In 2019, every EU country failed to achieve the 2020 target benchmark of 15% participation in adult education (EACEA, 2021). Across the UK, many adult services are being defunded and it remains to be seen whether further funding will be provided in response to the pandemic. However, Covid-19 has significantly reshaped our communities and in particular employment opportunities for many. School buildings are an obvious place to provide further learning opportunities for adults of all ages. Whether it is knowledge or skills oriented, or new life skills like swimming or fitness, communities should have the opportunity to make the most of these assets. Education policy makers at both national and local levels could and should be leveraging existing facilities and new build projects to better educate the whole population.

School-Community Partnerships

In the 1970s, Roger Hiemstra set out four conditions for the development of successful community-school interactions that go beyond the school providing community and educational services to their localities, based on his work in North America. These were re-published in the 1990s as follows:

• 1. Provision of diverse educational services to meet the varied learning needs of community residents of all ages.

• 2. Development of interagency cooperation and [various] public–private partnerships to reduce duplication of efforts and improve effectiveness in the delivery of human services.

• 3. Involvement of citizens in participatory problem solving and democratic decision-making.

• 4. Encouragement of community improvement efforts that make the community more attractive to both current and prospective residents and businesses (Hiemstra, 1997).

In England, the post-war Cambridgeshire Village Colleges¹ and the Hampshire Schools (Fig. 1) programmes, begun in the 1980s² also offer some examples to learn from.

Fig. 1

Impington Village School, Cambridgeshire, UK. Image W 2015-04-21, by sps 1955, is licenced under CC by 2.0

Hiemstra argued that the reorganisation of a conventional school into a community school did not require massive staffing changes. Rather, people would be selected on their commitment to this kind of education. However, he also noted the importance of an increased range of paraprofessional and volunteer roles to support community-based requirements and noted that some schools already employed (or provided space for) a community school nurse, librarian, medical specialist, senior citizen centre coordinator, police-school liaison officer, and adult education specialist. In addition, he proposed the critical importance of a community school director, community education coordinator, or community education agent.

To be a community asset, the community must be involved in and engaged with the school management activities; formally and informally. Likewise, school communities (teachers, pupils and parents) must engage in the activities of their local communities. This can extend to involving local groups in school-planning and design processes as well as curriculum-planning and resourcing.

Supporting Environmental Sustainability

Several ongoing research projects in the UK are assessing the importance of the quality of the environment to learning (daylight, air quality, noise pollution, outlook etc.).³ Furthermore, planning policy and guidance is already clear on standards which must be achieved to both provide the best possible learning environments from this perspective (Education and Skills Funding Agency [ESFA], 2018). However, schools also have the capacity to be leaders on sustainability in the built environment. Woolner (2016) has written about “the potential for the school in the city to be part of the solution to environmental, and perhaps social, injustice: efforts rooted in improving the school space begin to create a centre for sustainable living and an environmental resource for the wider community” (p. 49).This can happen through school planning that takes into account environmental costs of energy usage and travel; school buildings that themselves act as models of good practice, such as including a green ‘living’ roof, creating growing spaces and nature reserves on site; by embedding education for sustainable development (ESD) into children and adult learning; and by initiating and/or supporting community initiatives, such as providing space for local farmers’ markets and for shared community meal preparation and eating (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Hackney School of Food, London, UK (Note The Hackney School of Food is located at Mandeville Primary School in Clapton, London. The project is a new initiative to teach children and adults from across London how to grow, prepare and cook delicious, nutritious food, while also providing an inspiring community space and productive gardens for local residents to enjoy. The school is a joint venture between the Learning, Education, Arts and Partnership [LEAP] Federation—a network of three Hackney primary schools—and Chefs in Schools, a charity dedicated to transforming food, food culture and food education in schools through training, guidance and support. Designed by Surman Weston Architects. Photo credit Jim Stephenson)

A Catalyst for Urban Regeneration

Schools are an essential part of any new community—including inner urban high-density developments. Educational facilities in our urban communities present opportunities to make the public realm more attractive and welcoming. In some cases, schools can be accommodated in repurposed buildings, bringing historic and redundant buildings back to life. During one of the seminars held for Educating the City, Richard Coppell (Development Director, Urban and Civic) noted that:

Good development is all about the early delivery of infrastructure – that’s the standard things like roads, trees and drawings, the very basic things: but also, importantly, the social fabric as well, so schools go in usually before any residents arrive.

Schools and other learning facilities are central to the quality of life in a locality and therefore are key components of local planning and development activities. In parts of the UK, as elsewhere, there are also an increasing number of schools integrated with the local job market across public and private sectors, which provide opportunities for partnerships that can support vocational study and enhance the range of local commercial and social activities.

Of course, processes of urban regeneration tend to create complex shifts in patterns of inequality, as land and house prices rise, and can ‘price’ poorer people out of an area. Since poverty is associated with both material (financial) and non-material (lived experience) outcomes, addressing it through place-based initiatives—including new school building and improvement—is most likely to benefit poorer households when part of an explicit neighbourhood renewal policy, rather than being entirely reliant on the market.

Mixed-use developments are thus a crucial part of the strategy towards achieving more socially sustainable urban neighbourhoods. Mixed-use communities, which may integrate combinations of residential, education, retail, office and other uses, offer several advantages such as reducing car dependence, combating sprawl, and fragmentation of urban areas, promoting economic development and integration of complementary functions. In post-pandemic times, these self-sufficient pocket cities are likely to have even greater appeal; limiting the need to travel as often and developing a greater sense of community among occupants through repeated and sustained interactions.

Further environmental economies can be made possible for such developments through more holistic approaches to provision of energy, where schools can have a valuable role. In June 2019, the UK Government legislated a net-zero target for carbon emissions by 2050. Towards this end, mixed-use developments have several advantages through creating site-wide energy centres which operate more efficiently and through co-locating building types and user types with complementary needs (e.g., residential energy use typically peaks in the evening, while school energy use is typically at its highest throughout the day). Where shared energy centres are used, utilising renewable energy sources as well as technologies such as heat pumps (air/ground/water), can enable the energy centre to operate at its optimum efficiency. This can save on both capital expenditure as well as space.

A Framework for Change: Enabling Schools as Local Social Infrastructure

Unfortunately, our research showed that multiple barriers exist in the UK that are preventing schools easily operating as social infrastructure in the ways outlined above. By working with experts across the field we identified the primary challenges are in this context, and what changes are needed to enable schools to better integrate with their wider communities. These findings are divided into five key points, each framed by their underlying problem, and then by some possibilities for change and improvement: needing to take a long-term view; joining up the thinking; enabling schools to deliver community support; designing in community potential from the beginning; and changing the standards towards ‘Long Life, Loose Fit’ approaches. Each of these are elaborated, in turn, below.

Educational Assets and Facilities Are for the Long Term

The Problem: A Lack of Visioning for the Future

Schools in England are tied to central government policy and financing agendas, resulting in short-term thinking and ‘quick win’ eye-catching policies, like Building Schools for the Future (BSF) and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Whilst many innovative schools have been created and a variety of future scenarios predicted, there has been little to see of evidence-based long-term schools planning. Furthermore, schools in the UK are delivered through fragmented processes whereby the different actors don’t have the time, resources or motivation to build deeper relationships and perspectives, or to formulate educational and investment objectives based on the value that can be created with longer timescales. This short-termism results in an inability to consider broader issues for schools in their communities or to consider connecting other sites for social infrastructure together.

To overcome this and ensure that educational spaces are seen as part of the bigger picture, aimed not just at an immediate cohort of children but at all ages in a locality, and for future generations, we need to re-think how educational provision is funded, procured, designed and managed in ways that more effectively bridge gaps between culture and political powers. Below are four strategies for doing this.

Opportunity 1: Develop Evidence-Based Long-Term Priorities

Current policies and guidance are not reflective of broader social change: for example, consideration for school assets when there is fluctuating demand for school places and/or demographic change. In England demand for primary schools is beginning to decrease, while the secondary level population is rising (with of course, local differences in how this overall pattern is being played out). The Covid-19 pandemic may also have an impact on urban demographics as households who can, may have moved out of cities and towns.

Opportunity 2: Create Community Development Strategies for Education Assets and Programmes

Increasing opportunities for community owned/managed schools is another way in which infrastructure assets can be developed to better reflect the needs of locals and have lasting connections with their communities that can accommodate changing needs over time. Examples of this in the UK are few and far between, however Scotland opened its first community school in 2019—Strontian Primary School (Fig. 3) (Seith, 2019).

Fig. 3

Strontian Primary School, Strontian, Scotland. Designed by KD-Partnership Architects. Image by James Anderson, Northcolour Ltd. (Note The small Highland community decided to build its own school after parents rejected the local council's solution to sorting out their ageing primary school. The idea for a community-built school emerged from local people's work with the Highland Small Communities Housing Trust, which had some land available. The development is designed to be easily converted to residential housing in years to come when space in the adjacent secondary school becomes available for primary school use)

Opportunity 3: Adopt a Long Life and Adaptable Approach to Legacy and Condition of New and Existing Schools

As a result of short-term thinking and financing, schools are often unable to forward plan towards using their assets effectively, let alone procure and manage more flexible educational estates that can adapt responsively to changing requirements. In the UK, the School Resource Management Adviser (SRMA) programme was recently piloted and evaluated by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). The evaluation focused on identifying opportunities where trusts could improve efficiency/increase their revenue generation, through managing staffing deployment and associated curriculum matters (Education and Skills Funding Agency [ESFA], 2020). It is unclear from the reporting to date how income generation from community engagement was costed and where and how savings were made. Placing all responsibility on schools to streamline their estates is unlikely to lead to better community use, and greater support is required from local and central government towards achieving these objectives.

Opportunity 4: Promote the Value of Long-Term Investment in Education

We need to re-think the value of schools’ life-cycle costs and support the ability for them to adapt over time with their communities—rather than just respond to the immediate, often fluctuating demands, for pupil places, which inevitably drives short term quality motives. In a school market where parents can exercise choice and funding follows pupils (as in England), schools must provide the ‘quality’ as quickly as possible that parents demand or face falling enrolment, loss of money and closure (Gibbons & Silva, 2008). We also need to create tools and processes that can better measure the long-term value equation of schools for developers, in relation to the overall investment made in the area, not just going for immediate ‘quick wins’ over price and profit but allowing and encouraging re-investment is sustainable and socially responsible development. Only by partnering and collaborating with government, local authority, developers, designers, communities and schools, can we provide a more mature response to the integration of schools in urban centres that balances the social infrastructure needs of a community alongside the practicalities of spatial and density constraints.

Join Up the Thinking

The Problem: Disconnected Procurement Policies and Practices

There are multiple levels of disconnect in England when it comes to thinking about educational estates. There is considerable imbalance between different government departments in their various policies and practices around procurement, design quality, standards and requirements. Educational guidelines at national and local levels are also fragmented and inconsistent. This results in a lack of innovation or flexibility. Education is framed as an operational and technical problem, which prevents deeper stakeholder or public debate around the quality of school buildings, its multiple functions, and the need for urban and local integration. While these deeper policy questions and the case for design quality are being asked for example through the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for Housing (2020), they are noticeably absent from the education sector.

Opportunity 1: Work Towards Holistic Approaches

While there are positive examples of more integrated and innovative approaches such as The London Plan Social Infrastructure SPG Policy 3.18 (The Mayor of London, 2016) in practice, the implementation of these polices is frequently hampered by a lack of operational sophistication or community involvement. Short term financial gain often drives the development of non-school uses which can mean that complementary facilities are less commercially viable. The Scottish Futures Trust, on behalf of the Scottish Government, is another initiative towards long-term arrangements for community and social infrastructure. This initiative brings together the public sector with Hubco, a public/private joint venture, to deliver new facilities (Amber Infrastructure, 2017) (Fig. 4). Managing the school estate thus becomes part of wider local government asset management planning. This may also mean working with others to identify the longer-term role of schools and their relationship to other local facilities, such as libraries, leisure, health and childcare.

Fig. 4

Bertha Park High School. Image courtesy of Perth & Kinross Council (Note Bertha Park High School was designed for Perth + Kinross Council, and delivered through Hub East Central Scotland, based on a radical design vision to give equality of the user and learning experience to all its occupants in an entirely seamless way. The school had to provide both a stimulating place to learn and a facility that could be used by the growing community of Bertha Park, an expanding residential suburb of Perth in central Scotland. The ground up building was the first new school in Scotland in 25 years)

Opportunity 2: Leverage Value Through Integrated Metrics

Current cost metrics in English schools’ programmes hamper creative thinking. This is not about ‘unnecessary extravagance’ but towards enhancing the usability and flexibility of the school stock over time. Simultaneously, bureaucracy and lack of accountability between and across departments prevents debate about new types of cost-effective innovation that can make commercial sense out of leveraging mixed use; and/or community-centred schools that can act as lead assets on larger developments.

Opportunity 3: Create Spaces for Sharing Debate, Research and Development

Stakeholders from across the sector would benefit from opportunities to share expertise and experiences, underpinned by funded support for relevant research and development. Without a framework for producing, disseminating and discussing opportunities and challenges of current developments in education, schools remain ‘stuck’ in existing patterns, or only change based on individual or organisational commitment and effort.

Enable Schools to Deliver Community Support

The Problem: Overcoming Operational Constraints

Many schools already aim to work with their diverse communities but struggle with the multiple managerial, operational and regulatory constraints that hinder the easy management or use of school facilities for communities, or the expansion of connections with local neighbourhoods beyond pupil cohorts and their parents or carers. Without a commitment from national government or local authorities, along with appropriate funding, school principals, teachers and governing boards find themselves sorting out ways to enhance community provision on an individual case-by-case basis, with little support guidance or building up of re-usable knowledge. This is both time consuming and exhausting. In addition, long term procedures need to be in place to create sustainable integration, because connecting financing, governance and operations are critical to successful inclusion/integration of community infrastructure to schools.

Opportunity 1: Enable Schools to Support ‘Levelling Up’

For schools in areas that already have good local facilities, and where many parents and carers already have individual financial and social resources to support their children, the vital requirement of education as a public good is less significant. But in low-income and under-resourced catchment areas, schools are central to enabling equality of opportunity for the next generational of learners and their families. Failure to support schools and their wider communities can become a serious problem and so sustained efforts to ‘level up’ are needed (Tomaney & Pike, 2021). This means making it operationally and financially possible—and even beneficial—for schools to act as a centre of public good in their neighbourhoods. This needs to be the norm, and the expectation of our schools.

Opportunity 2: Provide Guidance for Community Management and Operations

Both the Department of Education Northern Ireland (DENI 2014) and the Public Policy Unit for Wales (Dyson & Kerr, 2016) has produced guides to increasing the community use of school facilities. There are also examples of good practice internationally (Government of South Australia, Department for Education and Child Development, 2017). This is essential to create general standards for the use by all schools, rather than relying on individual skills or assuming pre-existing knowledge within organisations.

Designing in Community Potential from the Beginning

The Problem: Schools Seen as Standalone Institutions

We argue that the importance of the design of schools in facilitating a wide range of uses and users is often underestimated or forgotten, amidst increasingly constrained budgets and baseline school designs. Yet, changes in everything from to curricula to community engagement have spatial and design implications. When schools are not considered as embedded in neighbourhoods, then many design possibilities are ignored or marginalized.

Opportunity 1: Integrate Social Infrastructural Issues into Design Briefing

If schools are also ‘community hubs’ (The Scottish Government, 2009), then not only policy agendas but also briefing processes need to incorporate provision for a range of community services and activities. Design needs to be able to explicitly enable community use of both indoor and outdoor facilities within the school estate by making schools more open, accessible and welcoming at all times. The layout needs to orchestrate public and private zones and enable opening of different sections of the school at different times of the day/week/year; and to support the school in managing security, cleaning, and maintenance.

Consideration should also be given to how the school facilities fit into the wider social infrastructure in the area. For example, in the UK new school sports halls are being built next door or near existing community sports facilities, often at great expense in the form of basement or roof top spaces due to tight site constraints. Consideration could be given at the briefing stage to the jointly funded shared-use facilities, releasing cost and space and enhancing the provision for both school and community. This is not limited to sports halls and could include theatres, libraries, and general outdoor recreation.

Opportunity 2: Develop Flexible Space Management Systems

As well as ‘designing in’ more integrated use of spaces (from a school to its communities and from existing local provision to a school), there is increasing potential for more flexible and integrated forms of space management, that can enable increased sharing and effective usage such as through flexible online booking systems. For example, in the UK Kajima is a property developer that also builds and runs schools through its Kajima Partnerships arm. In addition, it has a business called Kajima Community which promotes and manages the community use of schools and other public facilities. This has included developing a digital platform for coordinating community space hire across a range of sectors, including education. By either providing lettings software that enables schools to manage their own space hire—thus optimising the use of their facilities and generating additional revenue—or by providing lettings services to schools, such a system effectively enables space sharing.

It also helps to manage changing space needs through time, as activities change, grow or contract. This can reduce management costs and simplify legalities around shared use. With such flexibility, opportunities for further revenue streams and co-location of complementary uses grows. For example, schools that are contracting due to falling school rolls could rent out space for start-up units or other appropriate commercial uses, both to raise income and to adapt to fluctuating student numbers. As Matthew Goodwin (Managing Director Architecture Initiative) said at one of our UCL Educating the City seminars (March 2020):

School/community buildings should be designed to be flexible enough to provide opportunities for retail/commercial lettings, and for example through a shell and core⁴ style building arrangement that allows for flexibility when needed. This is particularly pertinent in the current pandemic as we all change our patterns of working, learning, and leisure. There is an opportunity for local business hubs to be established which would enhance integration, fulfil a local need and generate a revenue stream for the school.

Opportunity 3: Building ‘Bridges’ Not Fences

Building fences around schools to lock kids in and keep the community out is not a positive position, either visually or physically. Furthermore, 39% of sports facilities in England are trapped behind these school gates (Greater Sport, 2020). Yet, such barriers between the spaces for children’s education and the spaces of the city are rarely challenged. The position persists in England that schools must be gated environments that physically prohibit access to maintain a safe environment. These spaces are often further guarded by biometric/card readers; reinforcing an insider–outsider relationship that signals who is welcome/expected and who is not. This prohibits anyone approaching the school who is neither parent, pupil or staff—which in many cases is the point—but consequently changes the perception of schools to one of a controlled and inward-looking environment.

While issues of security are not to be downplayed, a shift in policy is needed to end this entrenched view that fences are inevitable. There are many examples of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ solutions to this problem. For example, the school building itself can provide a secure line and in doing so give the school a more civic presence within an urban streetscape. Hard systems, such as CCTV can be used to support these passive approaches. As discussed by Julia Atkins in a webinar hosted by Hayball Architects⁵; by making sure end users and the community are involved in working out the security requirements, and design for positive rather than negative behaviour, the assumed need for separation as the only form of protection can be challenged.

Opportunity 4: Urban Schools Providing Public Open Space

It’s possible that in certain contexts, a school building and site may be able to provide new and diverse types of urban spaces. When we build schools in dense urban areas, is this not an opportunity to consider ways of creating more spaces for the public as well? By pooling financial resources from a variety of social infrastructure pots, this surely could represent value for money for the community. The need for local urban public spaces has become particularly evident throughout the pandemic, when parks and other open spaces in local communities are at capacity, and yet large school playgrounds have remained gated an inaccessible.

Opportunity 5: Change the Standards—Towards Long Life, Loose Fit

Alex Gordon, in his role as President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, defined ‘good architecture’ in 1972 as buildings that exhibit ‘long life, loose fit and low energy’.

Many suggest that the underlying financial model for much building development and construction is too focused on short-term profit, resulting in buildings built in the ‘cheapest dumbest way possible’.⁶ In contrast, schools should be guided by socially accountable policies that re-think value. This means adopting a more flexible approach to the rules governing the size and design of new schools, to allow for the best possible use of resources, not just by adding more space, but designing spaces more effectively to maximise opportunities for multiple uses, to support social infrastructure sharing and to future-proof against unexpected change.

Next Steps

This chapter has reported on a scoping study undertaken in the UK, offering an overview of the challenges and opportunities linked to developing schools as social infrastructure within the context of local current policies and practices.

Through discussion with global colleagues, and the study of international examples, we know that many of the opportunities and challenges raised in our research paper are not unique to England, or the UK, nor are many of the ideas for change presented new. We are also aware that in such a short piece of research, with a small group of stakeholders from across education in the UK and beyond, we are only ‘scratching the surface’ in terms of contexts, data and examples. Our study is therefore aimed at illuminating future decision-making in England, and at opening questions for future research (both nationally and internationally) rather than proposing solutions. What was interesting was a shared consensus across the private and public providers and educators we worked with, that current educational policy was adversely holding back the potential of schools to act as social infrastructure. It was also agreed that education policies in England were at a ‘low’ in terms of standards and cost controls over school procurement, standards, and design. Whilst there are many examples of individual schools built as high-quality social infrastructure and of individuals and groups committed to education integrated with its locality, there is much less evidence of joined up policy or sector-level initiatives.

One of the important lessons for us about in this study was how equality and inclusion, and environmental/social sustainability, are both essential and inevitably intertwined in the improvement of schools and need to be treated simultaneously rather than separately. Taking this path may have more impact on educational policy in England, as sustainability is currently more politically acceptable that socially inspired improvements. However, the pandemic has presented a critical opportunity to think beyond academic attainment to the social and pastoral responsibility of schools in our communities. In the UK, The Big Answer⁷ (The Children’s Commissioner, 2021) has highlighted the urgent need to place mental health and wellbeing at the centre of schools. A small follow-on research project by the Learning Environments Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre (LEEDIC) at The Bartlett UCL⁸ called Adapting school designs for health and wellbeing during and post pandemic will develop this, by bringing together researchers, professionals, educators and other experts from across environmental and social sciences to co-explore current concerns with children’s learning, health and wellbeing through the lens of school design. Here, we want to develop the themes emerging from Educating the City (together with a parallel project from The Bartlett Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE) called Advancing School Performance: Indoor environmental quality, Resilience and Educational outcomes, or ASPIRE for short. This new project aims to scope the range and type of design interventions that schools can apply to better support pupils and staff both during and post-pandemic, as well as enable longer term building stock and educational support resilience. This includes issues around environmental improvements for ventilation, hygiene, spacing, ‘pinch-points’ and entry/egress, as well as wider issues of social infrastructure and community support such as safety, belonging and mental health support. As with Educating the City, the overall aim is to create a series of knowledge exchange activities to enable debate and inform policy through the creation of a discussion paper. Perhaps through applied research and scoping such as this, national and local governments can be persuaded to take up opportunities which enable the leveraging of school assets to better integrate with, and enhance, their localities through environmental and socially sustainable approaches.