Creating excellent secondary schools

Our guide for headteachers and local authorities provides step-by-step advice on how to achieve a well-designed school.

The government has ambitious plans for England's secondary schools: its £45 billion Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme will see 3,500 secondary schools built or renewed by 2020. If BSF delivers on its promises every secondary school will provide the right environment not only to transform education but also provide opportunities for the whole community. This should mean schools that are inspiring, innovative, flexible and environmentally sustainable and for this good design is fundamental.

To help local authorities and headteachers get the best possible design for their schools, CABE has published Creating excellent secondary schools: a guide for clients which explains what is essential to achieve a well-designed school. This includes:

• a school that knows what it wants, with a clear vision for how education will be delivered in the future
• a client design advisor who can help a school translate that vision into a brief, insist on high quality and challenge proposals that fall short of the school's aspirations
• a well thought-through approach to sustainability, both in construction and use of the building
• a thorough brief developed in consultation with the school and which takes into account the flexibility needed to adapt to future patterns of teaching and learning
• a competitive process that encourages the use of high-quality design teams
• skilled designers who can work effectively with the public sector procurer, end-users and suppliers and manufacturers
• builders and managers who rise to the challenge of design and work well with their clients
• sufficient time for designers to achieve the right solution, and a realistic budget for building a high-quality school.

The guide provides set-by-step advice from the earliest stages of ensuring that staff students and the wider community have their say; to working effectively with architects, contractors and consultants; right through to the finished building.

The guide's publication follows the launch of CABE's Schools design panel - a service that will see us review every new secondary school proposal under Building Schools for the Future.

The process of designing a secondary school is illustrated through 13 case studies, for example, Buttershaw High School in Bradford where students worked with bid teams to make sure that their perspective was reflected in the design, and the Academy of St Francis of Assisi in Liverpool where the building itself shows students what environmental sustainability looks like and means.

Creating excellent secondary schools is being sent to all BSF schools and relevant local authorities.