The school building boom: Cardboard in a class of its own

A classroom has been built completely of cardboard in Westcliff-on-Sea. And a "living roof" of plants will protect the Jubilee School in Brixton when it opens next month. British schools are in the grip of a building boom, and the nation's architects are on the loose.

It is 30 years since professional designers played a significant part in the education system. But with capital spending surging past ?2bn a year, they have suddenly re-emerged with clipboards full of radical ideas about how classrooms should look, and even how children should be learning.

Not since the Victorian era has so much money been poured into corridors and classrooms. A total of 650 new school buildings are scheduled, mostly through the Private-Finance Initiative, and another 3,000 schools are preparing for some degree of refurbishment.

Some of the changes are simple. At Kingsdale, a struggling school in Southwark, south London, where two thirds of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, the loos were so disgusting that the pupils went home to relieve themselves. There were no form rooms and no lockers, so they had to hump heavy books around all day. By the mid-Nineties, the school was officially judged to be failing.

Now, however, Kingsdale is the subject of a Government-backed experiment to look at the relationship between good design and good teaching. Staff, pupils and parents were consulted on a design blueprint, and work has begun on a major overhaul using ?9m from the Department for Education and Skills. The result is a more flexible use of light and space – plus clean lavatories, form rooms and lockers.

Part of Kingsdale's problem was old-fashioned dilapidation, says Hilary Cottam, the former director of School Works, a Government-funded charity that has overseen the project. "The classrooms were in disrepair, the corridors vandalised, and the lavatories in an appalling state," she says.

The designers tried to go beyond the basics. "We asked why the school day still operates like a 19th-century production line, delivering knowledge in unappetising chunks to pupils who move through the school day at the sound of a bell."

Psychologists, educationists and architects were hired. After a three-month consultation, they designed a school based around all-age "houses" or "home groups" rather than age groups. The timetable is being rewritten and an attempt has been made to cut down on bullying and misbehaviour by eliminating things like a main corridor from the layout.

In September, the Queen will open the Jubilee primary school in Brixton, another London project that insisted on local consultation. The architects, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, have ensured that each classroom has access to futuristic "break out" spaces ranged like pods along the side of the building, which can be used for special projects, one-to-one tuition or meetings. In common with other new buildings, it has been designed to accommodate technological advances. For example, classrooms will feature "interactive" white boards, doubling as blackboard and giant computer screen.

The Jubilee School also pays attention to environmental sustainability. Like the firm's first school building, Great Notley primary in Essex, it will have a roof made of living sedum plants. It is also ventilated naturally using wind chimneys that pull air through the classrooms.

The past three years have already seen some notable achievements, with new school buildings featuring prominently on the Royal Institute of British Architects lists of award winners. This year's awards feature the Jubilee School, Hampden Gurney Church of England primary school in central London, the cardboard building at Westborough primary school at Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex, new girls' boarding houses at Haileybury School in Hertfordshire, and Whiteley primary school in Fareham, Hampshire.

One of the striking things about the cardboard building at Westborough primary, apart from its eye-catching appeal, is how cheap it was to build. Designed by architects Cotterel and Vermeulen, it cost only ?160,000 and used 90 per cent recycled materials. Now, the school can boast cutting-edge design, shaped as it is like a piece of origami from the outside and held up with giant cardboard tubes on the inside. But it also has a functional space for meetings with parents or groups of teachers.

Hampden Gurney typifies the intelligent use of space shown by most of the prize- winners. It describes itself as "a vertical school", with five storeys crammed into the space once occupied by a bombsite near Paddington in central London. It is a warm contrast to the straight lines and hulking appearance of the traditional London primary school, with its curved glass frontage that has led to comparisons to a beehive. The children "move up" the school physically and metaphorically as they get older. Each floor has internal courtyards or "decks" lit by a central atrium, affording safe places to play or teach, away from some of the busiest roads in the country. There is also a revival of the rooftop playground.

It remains to be seen which of the designs works best in practice. Award-winning structures from the past, such as the glass and steel Pimlico School in London, have not always proved winners in the long run. Such schools have sometimes been cold in winter, and noisy and unbearably hot in the summer. For the Government's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) however, the real risks are not associated with innovation, but with shoddy design. Some of the new cash going into schools has already helped to spread a rash of unpleasant, badly drawn buildings with minimal architectural input.

"What you're getting is patchy performance," says Jon Rouse from Cabe. "Some of the new buildings are good. Others are atrocious. Some of the new schools in North Wiltshire for example are little better than industrial sheds, without windows. We need to work with the DfES to ensure that it doesn't happen again."

The problems are not hard to identify. The old systems for commissioning major building works have broken down as local authorities lose their clout. And money is in short supply. The sheer desperation to get the things built works against good design. "We're trying to build too quickly and too cheaply," says Mr Rouse. "The result is homogenised schools. Schools as McDonald's, plonked down with no feel for the local context.

"There's a danger of repeating the mistakes of the past. One of the problems we have is that headteachers are so pleased to have anything, that often they accept things that they shouldn't."

education@independent.co.uk