2009 Conference of the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) Australasia Region

Closing the Learning Gap – Environments Making a Difference 24-26 September 2009 Darwin Convention Centre

Securing an Education Renaissance: Education and the Built Environment

Tess Lea School for Social and Policy Research Charles Darwin University

1 Securing an Education Renaissance: Education and the Built Environment

It is a great honour and pleasure to be here today.

I think this really is an important and historic event, bringing educational leadership into conversation with facility planning and design and let me say thanks from the outset to the organisers, going back many months now, for their work in bringing this unique event to Darwin. To the sponsors for their assistance, and most fundamentally, to the Larrakia people and to their visitors from other Aboriginal estates whose sweat and labour for country has made this such an interesting part of the world for people to live and work.

I have been reflecting for a while on how best to broach the promised topic of this talk. I am neither an educator nor a facility planner. I am an anthropologist, with all the scattered manners that go with that identity. And so, true to my ratbag discipline, from the outset I want to upset my own abstract and abandon the chicken-egg binaries there posed to talk instead from the point of view of networks. New computers do not transform learning. Attendance does not matter more than teacher quality. Like good buildings, these are necessary but not sufficient to answer such important questions as why some schools are better than others; of why, when good ideas abound about community engagement processes, it remains so hard to stop schools being intimidating as institutions. Replacing single explanations, I want to put interacting networks in which people and technologies, buildings, space, and what we call ‘stakeholders’ – a funny name for different assemblages of people, technologies, customs and environments – work to facilitate or inhibit the delivery of success. So my way of dealing with the key question of how to improve education outcomes for disadvantaged learners in our region will be to poke at it from a number of angles: historical, anthropological, topographical and also philosophical.

There are three interrelated concepts to hold in mind:

1 1. The first is that design is always ideological: politics and history are embedded in the act of imagining space and in spatial practices. ‘Every shape of created space entails a problem of projection’ (Sloterdijk 2009). The open plan classrooms that are today such a bane for students with hearing problems reflect a laudable vogue for levelling hierarchies and fostering creativity and freedom of expression. Current calls for high-tech “integrated information environments” represent the same desire to graft our projections about young people’s needs onto school facility design.

This entanglement of imagined social contexts and child development imperatives with spatial design has a long history stretching to the very beginning of public schools.1 Yet school design and instructional habits have also proved remarkably resilient, stabilised by the overriding need to provide for large numbers in education in a manageable way. For all the shifts in emphasis over time, the classroom is a change-resistant foundation, a fixed spatial feature, which is essentially concerned with asserting discipline, in distinction from the unruliness of the street and the exuberance of the playground.2 Any ideas for alternatives still need to resolve the same issues, for, as our first case study will show, creative pandemonium can teach, just not in a sustainable way for the many; while more rigid forms, as case study two shows, are not necessarily for the bad.

2. The second point is that the either/or in ideas about what matters most for education are an analytical closed loop. When we are not clear on how

1 As Mark Dudek has noted in his book Architecture of Schools: The New Learning Environment (2000), over the last two hundred years, “the constructional technology ranged between two extremes: on the one hand, heavy traditional structures, which were robust but inflexible. On the other extreme, lightweight modernist conceptions which were quick and relatively cheap to build but which had all kinds of constructional and environmental shortcomings. A similar educational dichotomy can be discerned which pitched traditional teaching methods against more progressive experimental approaches.’ (2000: 10) 2 Space does not allow elaboration but this point also attends to a note by education writer Dean Ashenden, who argues that ‘the extraordinary resilience and durability of the class and the classroom justifies a significant scholarly literature. …. The origins of this fundamental unit certainly long predate…the industrial revolution (its factories are often blamed) and are perhaps to be found in the pulpit and pews of church and then of chapel. In any event, the class and the classroom are now deeply entrenched not just in the physical plant of schooling but in the hearts and minds of teachers in a way that goes well beyond their pride in the tricky craft of “classroom management.” The classroom door closes ...the teacher becomes, for the next forty minutes, him-or her- self.’ (Ashenden 2009; original emphasis)

2 issues interconnect, we can overemphasise some ‘solutions’ over others. Hence my emphasis on networks or what economists might call value chains. I want to relieve infrastructure of some of the responsibility that is loaded onto it, in terms of expectations of direct influence on student behaviours, teacher habits and/or learning outcomes. Because the activities along the chain are interdependent, mapping backward from the desired outcome to the beginning of the chain will increase chances of success throughout. But expecting one part to bear the burden of permanent reform is a recipe for more failed intent.

3. My third point concerns issues of detail and scale. The circumstances of Indigenous education vary across multiple registers. We are familiar with the idea that urban and remote communities differ. We are less familiar with the idea that in some locations, Indigenous education infrastructure presents a very dense phenomenon (including good libraries, secure and stable staffing; excellent ITC; brilliant sporting and extracurricular facilities; and so on); while in other places it is very thinly populated, marked more by the absence of things (such as teacher housing). The question of uneven distribution opens up problems of topography; which, in this post-colonial context, are issues of power, poverty and race. But if we go straight to these large categories, we find they are too big to do anything with in the particular, when the particular matters a great deal. What ends up as a school facility or material item is always the end product of lots and lots of details – skilled hands, metals, bricks, articles, policy papers, funding spreadsheets, fax machines, drawing boards, verbal encounters, computer terminals, and much else besides. The more we banish consideration of these issues to the back of the class, the more we risk substituting generalities for precise analysis of action and measurable effect. Feel good one-liners – vague claims about ‘making a difference’ and ‘closing gaps’ – substitute for evidence. We miss the detail of how an announced solution is actually going to deliver anything. Imprecise specification yields imprecise results; which is precisely the destiny of case study four, the uptake of Learning Lessons.

3 Why stress the importance of networks, precision and technical details? Let’s consider the current context. Largesse for infrastructure spending is at an all time high in the NT because of sex scandals, resumption of leasehold title and global financial markets. It is now a year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Since then governments in America, the euro zone and Britain have provided capital, loans and guarantees to banks equivalent to about one sixth of GDP. Economic wizards are peering into financial entrails looking for a glimmer of ‘real’ recovery, or what they call a dead-cat bounce3. In Australia, with the Federal Government pouring cash into buildings to counteract the economic slump, another debate rages: sudden funding for school infrastructure upgrades, new libraries and multi-purpose halls under the Building the Education Revolution is forcing ill-suited and overpriced design templates onto unwilling schools and driving up the price of construction at the same time. At high speed then, these are just some of the networks involved in infrastructure and learning outcomes.

These intersecting trajectories make chicken-egg arguments somewhat nonsensical, but we like to have them even so. Thus it has long been argued that Indigenous education is in the poor state it is in because it was culturally inappropriate from the get-go. When asked what will fix the situation, answers are invariably include one or more of the following 1. Good teachers 2. High expectations 3. First-rate facilities 4. Contemporary equipment 5. Reduced class sizes 6. Quality learning environment 7. Good parental involvement/community engagement 8. Attitude of the principal/strong leadership 9. Respect for language and culture 10. Accountability and measurement that reflects school circumstances

3 A temporary recovery from a prolonged decline or bear market, after which the market continues to fall – based on the saying, "Even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from high enough"

4 Everyone has their culprit. For some, if we want to ‘close the gap’, we need to acknowledge that Indigenous children learn kinetically rather than through drill and kill techniques; and that the Eurocentric biases of the school – linguistically, spatially and culturally – inhibits Aboriginal sociality. This profound disconnect is reflected in the architecture, with their badly designed, badly maintained buildings and ugly shared bathrooms, square classrooms, single-door access, desks and chairs facing the teacher, chalk and talk, pigeon-holing. (TRADITIONAL CLASSROOM)

But as with many issues to do with Indigenous education, it is important to uncover the extensive network of practices and influences at play, rather than yield to the damaging desire for singular propositions. Anthropologically- speaking, our ideas about what’s best for Indigenous children often confuse what is universal and what is culturally specific. Those bad classrooms are probably bad for everyone. In the case studies that follow my argument is that reform depends on the detail of implementation. And that this detail – whether we are talking about built environments, pedagogical approach or definitions of achievement – needs to be as technically robust and well informed as it can be.

5 Deinstitutionalising the institution

Consulting with architects to gather background for this talk, it seems there have been long debates about how to ‘de-institutionalise’ the institution of schools. This movement has surprisingly early origins. In the early decades of the 20th century such experiments as Maria Montessori's Casa dei Bambini in Rome (1907) and Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf School in Germany (1919), took place alongside the Malting House Garden School in Cambridge, England, the first of my case studies.

The Malting House School was established in 1924 for young children aged 2½ to 7 years, financed by the wealthy and eccentric Geoffrey Pyke, who wanted for his own son something other than the unhappy, neurotic education he’d experienced as a child (Cameron 2006: 858). It was run for its short five year life by a brilliant young psychologist, Susan Isaacs (Drummond 2000; Gardiner 1969), whose keen eye was caught by Pyke’s enticing advertisement:

→→WANTED—an Educated Young Woman with honours degree— preferably first class—or the equivalent, to conduct education of a small group of children aged 2-1/2–7, as a piece of SCIENTIFIC WORK and RESEARCH. →→Previous educational experience is not considered a bar, but the advertisers hope to get in touch with a university graduate—or someone of equivalent intellectual standing—who has hitherto considered themselves too good for teaching and who has probably already engaged in another occupation. A LIBERAL SALARY—liberal as compared with research work or teaching—will be paid to a suitable applicant who will live out, have fixed hours and opportunities for a pleasant independent existence. An assistant will be provided if the work increases. They wish to obtain the services of someone with certain personal qualifications for the work and a scientific attitude of mind towards it. Hence a training in any of the natural sciences is a distinct advantage. Preference will be given to those who do not hold any form of religious belief but this is not by itself considered to be a substitute for other qualifications. ….Communications are invited to: Box168, ‘NATURE’, c/o MACMILLAN & CO., LTD., St. Martin's Street, London W.C.2.'' (Gardner 1969: 54)

6 Isaac’s detailed notes from her close observational data on the efforts of these toddlers and young children to explore the world around them, using Bunsen burners, saws, knives and scalpels, were published in a series of books that are now highly regarded as classics in educational psychology4; and during its time the School was targeted by many visitors: other scientists, a film-maker, economists, psychoanalysts from across Europe.

The filmmaker, Mary Field, caught something of the spirit of the school: The children were dissecting Susan Isaacs’ cat which had just died, when normally they worked with frogs or dogfish. They all seem to be enjoying themselves immensely, digging away at the carcass….then there was the bonfire. It was supposed to be an exercise in free play, but it got a bit out of hand. The fire spread and spread and reached the apple trees, and then destroyed a very nice boat. Even Geoffrey Pyke was a little upset about that, and he seemed a very calm man. (Filmmaker Mary Field, cited in Didek 2000: 21).

Isaacs own notes show the students making their own ‘dead cat bouncing’ speculations (SLIDE):

→→18.6.25. The children let the rabbit out to run about the garden for the first time, to their great delight. They followed him about, stroked him, and talked about his fur, his shape, and his ways. 13.7.25. Some of the children called out that the rabbit was ill and dying. They found it in the summer house, hardly able to move. They were very sorry, and talked much about it. They shut it up in the hutch and gave it warm milk. Throughout the morning they kept looking at it; they thought it was getting better, and said it was "not dying today." →→14.7.25. The rabbit had died in the night. Dan found it and said, "It’s dead—its tummy does not move up and down now." Paul said, "My daddy says that if we put it into water, it will get alive again." Mrs. I. said, "Shall we do so and see?" They put it into a bath of water. Some of them said, "It is alive." Duncan said, "If it floats, it’s dead, and if it sinks, it’s alive." It floated on the surface. One of them said, "It’s alive because it’s moving." This was a circular movement, due to the currents in the water. Mrs. I. therefore put in a small stick which also moved round and round, and they agreed that the stick was not alive. 4 See, for example, S. Isaacs (1933) Social Development h in Young Children: A Study of Beginnings London: Routledge; (1932; reprint 1970) The Children We Teach: Seven to Eleven Years London: University of London Press.

7 They then suggested that they should bury the rabbit, and all helped to dig a hole and bury it. (Isaacs 1930: 182-183; cited in Drummond 2000)

The educators believed if very young children are allowed to learn by seeing and doing, and not simply by being told, they will swiftly develop a capacity to reason, hypothesise and operate scientifically. In what could be a modern day treatise on Outcomes Based Education; or the brand new ways of e-learning, Pyke stressed that their method substitutes the authority of the pedagogue with the attitude of the ‘co-investigator’ (Cameron 2006: 867). And of course, in an era heavily influenced by Freud, Klein and Piaget, the school founders believed that children experience powerful sexual urges, aggressions and passions which could be channelled to scientific pursuits, to create a ‘new generation less nerve ridden than the old’ (Lawrence, in Cameron 2006: 864).

Anticipating the frightening new world order prefigured by the building tensions preceding World War Two, they said then what we also say now: to prepare the next generation to survive future unknowns a radically new educational method is required. And like today’s educators, they believed this could be achieved through a combination of pedagogical theory, teacher disposition and physical structures. Geoffrey Pyke described how the interior opened onto a large garden ‘with plants (which may without taboo be dug up everyday to see how they are getting on, leading mainly to the discovery that this is a temptation best resisted if growth is desired)’ (Cameron 2006: 864). From their converted house, Malting House children were free to move from inside to outside or back again; encouraged to use the space in a quest for knowledge ‘as opposed to conventional classrooms which created barriers between children and their natural interests’ (ibid).5

5 It is also of note that the decade of the Malting House experiment took place during a time of great interest in eugenics and fertility control to prepare a new generation of super Jews for the challenges of the twentieth century, to rival Germany’s dream of super Aryans (Cameron 2006: 862-3).

8 Though short lived, the Malting House School experiment exerted a tremendous influence on subsequent theories of child development and education. It bequeathed the idea that children’s natural intelligence must be sponsored and not repressed; that inside-outside spatial arrangements encourage this questing orientation; and that instructors must bring science and invite external scrutiny if they are to excel. But there are dangers in such utopian experiments. When they are made to travel as recipes for success, they can become poor copies of the original intent (c.f. Bhabha 1997). Malting House ideas about play-based learning and reduced authoritarianism were transplanted to new sites, becoming eerily similar to rationales for more free-form approaches adopted in remote area schools, where some breathtakingly inexpert practices take place in the name of ‘culturally appropriate’, anti-institutional early learning.

Rhydypenau Primary School, Cardiff, Wales We can now add to the list of what’s required for building an educational renaissance. Is the school recognised as an achieving school? Is it clear on what this takes? Or has it imported ideas from elsewhere stripped of their contextual detail?

In the Welsh league tables, the Rhydypenau Primary School in north Cardiff is among the top ten in the country. Cadavers play a distant role in this story too, with the term Rhyd-y-pen-au translating to something like ‘run/flow-the-human head’, referring to an old tradition of battle in the river country of mid Wales of cutting the heads off the slain and throwing them into a brook (Williams 1866: 10-11).

In terms of design, this is in no way a demonstration school. Its original classroom buildings were constructed in the 1930s and intended for no more than 100 children. Today, over 160 nursery and stage one pupils are located in these; while the remaining two-thirds of pupils are accommodated in temporary buildings erected post World War Two. (SLIDES) Classrooms are crowded, there’s rising damp, the stairs are too slippery to use; and each inspection report notes anew that that the poor facilities test the capacities of the staff to offer challenging programs (see Best 2006:14; item 48). Yet the school is so

9 over-subscribed, draconian measures have been introduced to manage intakes. Enrolling a child who is not at commencement age, but is transferring from another school, regardless of whether any other siblings are already in place, takes fierce determination. The parent can only appeal the school’s refusal through a full blown tribunal hearing with legal representation, under which the onus is on the parents to somehow prove that the school has not strictly adhered to formal regulations in their decision making. The tribunal’s decision is binding on the local authority and is fought out line by line. Only the well- rehearsed, well-resourced parent can emerge with successful enrolment in hand (PAPERWORK SLIDE).

This gives some clues as to why this school, despite its falling-down facilities, is within the top ten in the country. Enterprising parents compete for enrolment. Other clues rest in the school’s explicit dedication to academic attainment, to parental obligation, stable staffing and measured goal attainment. Transparency is a hallmark. The school’s warts-and-all inspection report is available on the school website for public downloading. Precise targets are set for improvement. If a parent removes a child from the school for anything other than illness for more than two days during semester, the parent risks being asked to relocate to another school. Teachers are up for open assessment of their teaching. Yet for all this disciplining of commitment, like the more free-form Malting House School, Rhydypenau encourages scientific inquiry from an early age and the children conduct many of their lessons outside, where secret spaces that only little people can access have also been created. Despite it being Wales, it takes a major weather calamity before outside lessons are suspended. Whatever infrastructure money is available is pumped into library stocks and an advanced IT laboratory. For this school, better facilities would be icing on an already rich cake. (LEARNING TAKES PLACE SLIDE)

Roebuck Primary School, Western Australia Our third case study is a story of an architect’s dream to build a school that matched community aspirations. The original Roebuck Primary School in Broome was established in 2000 using six domestic houses, joined by two demountables and an ablutions block. The sense of village that this ‘school in

10 houses’ created was much cherished, but unlike Rhydypenau (still in its temporary buildings six decades on), Roebuck planned its replacement from the outset and an architectural firm was commissioned to consult extensively with community members to develop a concept master plan for the new school.

The work of these consultations is captured in a catalogue of maps, drawings, video tapes, minutes of meetings and other computer-generated documents: technologies mediated the social as part of the planning, just as the planning was about integrating the spatial with the educational. The consultations further revealed the spaces between buildings to be as important as the buildings (Barker 2002: 14; also 17); and that, akin with students, teachers also need secret spaces for ‘withdrawal’; a reserved place with contemplative landscaping.

None of this was particularly contentious, and building for a new school began in 2003.6 From all accounts, it is now a proud new facility which received a boost from the full involvement of students and staff in the planning, a major outcome in its own right. But the retention of a sense of a ‘Village Street’ similar to the former School-in-Houses arrangement proved more difficult to implement; as was the creation of cultural gathering places – horseshoe mounds and shade – within the mid-points of the school yards, to enable those parents and carers of students to signal to their children without having to make their way through institutional halls and doors, giving them a neutral space to meet teachers and interact with the school.

Let’s pause at these excisions from the plan. On the face of it, they are ordinary compromises when time and cost considerations swing in to bat.7 But they are also the concepts most at odds with the normative form of the school. The Western Australian Education Department has guidelines that encode current learning about the success or otherwise of educational facilities and

6 In the first phase the administration and staff facilities were completed as well as the library, undercover area, three general classrooms and a purpose built early childhood centre. After the second phase the remainder of the school moved onto the new site which now included ten general classrooms and purpose built art and music facilities (Roebuck School website). 7 As with many projects, external works are often the first area where deductions are made, after tenders close too high, to bring the cost of a project back to the signs that made the original budget, itself an arbitrary ruse of rationality, a politically acceptable limit borne of other networks.

11 environments; and have a standard brief for schools which are designed to deliver “model school buildings” to suit these contemporary educational strategies. As we have noted, such ideas about ‘best strategies’ are never just themselves but also inscriptions formed of past decisions, customs, habits and embedded technologies: some scientific, most less so. Some adaptation was achieved to suit the local climate, context, and site (including retention of some natural flora identified as worthy of protection). But the village street concept— so overwhelmingly supported during the extensive consultations—made way for a final layout in which the buildings were formally grouped along an axis interspersed with landscaping in ways that are recognisable and familiar. The school yard is a piece of community land that also delimits. In one Northern Territory school that I know of, the benches on which old ladies rested in the cool shade of the corridors were removed. Apparently the women were distractions for the children.

Ten Years Ago: Learning Lessons Ten years ago I reviewed Indigenous education across the Northern Territory with Bob Collins. Our report plonked a dead cat on the table. (When we tried to brief then Education Minister, Peter Adamson, a man later made famous for being the first Lord Mayor of Darwin to be sacked for petty theft, he refused to see us, delegating us to an advisor. The advisor was at first quite relaxed. To our news that we had proof Indigenous education funds were being siphoned off for officer travel and microwaves in department kitchens8; evidence of corruption in reporting; and extraordinary cases of dereliction in duties, he simply responded that it was the government’s call whether or not the report would even be released (see also Lea 2005). Our counter-threat that the national tabloids would get the full story of suppression placed us on equal

8 The Commonwealth provides ‘supplementary’ funds that are theoretically intended to recognise the profound levels of disadvantage experienced by Indigenous learners, on the basis that the state provides mainstream school infrastructure and resources. As one bureaucrat put it, reflecting on pre-Learning Lessons days, “it came as a surprise to me, before the review, that IESIP was meant to be supplementation: I thought it was core, the sum of Indigenous funding. [For the officers in charge] It was money to burn” (Lea 2005). See Mellor and Corrigan (2004) and Walsh and Lea (2007) for more up-to-date descriptions of Commonwealth Indigenous education funding initiatives.

12 terms. We dropped contentious parts of the report; and a wake-up call was sounded.)

We had much to say about the disparity in infrastructure and the effect on Indigenous education outcomes, dedicating a chapter to this issue (Collins and Lea 1999: 63-70). Remote area school facilities were in a serious state of physical disrepair and staff housing was little better. We recommended greater attention be made to the messages that school facilities emit. Did they welcome parents and students to the reception? Did they invite community interaction? Did they signal the importance of learning? Or were they the accidental accretions of history and practice, put together without much thought for the impact of the physical environment on inhabitants? I have a strong memory of walking into schools with fake teak cabinets in which artefacts from Indonesia and sporting trophies were proudly on display, but nothing which acknowledged the dominant minority group in the school, local Indigenous students.

Much has changed, and here I would like to acknowledge the work of Leanne Taylor and her team in the NT Department of Education, for replacing the former ad-hocery in facility planning with a systematic approach that welcomes innovation. Though it took a while, even some of the big-ticket items are now being addressed, including ICT connectivity, improved staff housing, pre-school and secondary facilities. But the majority of recommendations were swallowed by bureaucratic processes, mirroring what we found as a key problem for reform in schools. Ours is a system that relies on the dreams, schemes, plots, plans, insistent demands, muscle and hard-hatted labour of school staff, parent groups and departmental officers to get what they need when they need it. This from Learning Lessons:

School Case Study 8: Efforts by the principal to establish a cooperative partnership between the school and community has encouraged strong preschool enrolment and attendance. Lack of tiling in the preschool bathrooms allows sullage water to pool on the floor, a longstanding problem. The principal attempts to have it addressed as an urgent minor repair, knowing these are prioritised. ‘It took four months of advocacy and a ministerial and even then it was only patched: the source problem was not addressed. The phone calls and the times I spend with writing or

13 explaining just to have band-aid treatment is just ridiculous. And then the contractor just did what he wanted anyway’.

School Case Study 27: A new head teacher inherits a badly run-down remote area school facility. Fans, air-conditioners, the photocopier, the lawn mower and a number of Apple computers are unusable, broken. She explained her experiences to the review: ‘It all takes a lot of time. We have to go through so many channels. You think you have done all the right things, in the right way and timeframe, then to discover something else is needed, or the paperwork was lost, and you are meant to remember the detail of every single phone call, who you have spoken to, and how you were meant to access the funding. That’s if the phones and faxes are working! Networking with other principals helps only to the point of confirming that others face the same issue’. (Collins and Lea 1999: 64)

Just over twelve months ago I was asked to look at education and training issues on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands in northern South Australia (Lea et al 2008). And again encountered frazzled school principals and administrative staff struggling valiantly to have key items repaired, built, attended to. They have to sit on phones, hassle, get hysterical, send and resend paperwork, pound tables…all this to garner a response that only partially meets requirements.

What should we make of this? Here I briefly want to show how such abstractions as ‘closing the gap’ are not resolved by big spends alone but are also the sum of mundane interactions at local levels of functioning. It is at these levels where the relation between what I have called ‘the scales’ is given life and where our points for improvement really lie.

To illustrate the role of detail within networks, let’s consider something humble, a technology to be found in schools, universities and planning offices alike: the photocopier/printer. As technology-that-matters, it is taken for granted until it breaks down. Its role in the sequence of learning becomes unsilenced when papers can’t be distributed, big books can’t be created, newsletters can’t be sent home. If the one person—usually a woman—who is intimate with the machine is absent, perhaps a brave soul will have a go, opening flap A to lift lever B and peer for paper doing foul play at point C. Options exhausted, a

14 repairperson is called in—usually a man—who brings a tackle box of widgets to set the copier back to rights. If there’s no money or no one available in a three hundred kilometre radius, days of phone calls in between re-remembering the disabled machine amongst other demands will follow. In an instance we learn the difference between facility, enablement, efficiency, ease, facilitation; and petty resistance, delay and inertia.

Understanding the detail of how things work and how they need to be made to work against little resistances, understanding the precarious mechanics of improvement, the relentless attention required to guard the flight path between good intents and capacity to deliver, is where it’s at. Regard for detail is the right focus for reformist policy. The message that is being sent by the broken machine is akin to that sent by the badly designed classroom, a poorly stocked library, the intermittent IT connections or the toilets that are not fixed swiftly. They are messages about the rewarding and the unrewarding workplace; about welcome, intelligence and respect; or about stigma, reduced expectation and enhanced futility. As the author of our last case study has observed, ‘School Spaces, and the areas between them, cannot by themselves change behaviour but there is definitely a link between the feel, materials, make-up and finish of spaces and importantly what happens within and around them’ (Barker 2002: 6). Students and teachers alike spend two thirds of their waking lives in these spaces, building formative emotional, physical and intellectual experiences. They are simultaneously learning that they are valued or that they are an exception to a norm. And if teachers are frontline workers, classroom facilities of first class design and amenity demonstrate that their profession is esteemed, literally manifesting their social value in material form by making a complex task easier.

Our list expands: 1. Is the school recognised as being an “achiever school”? Has attention been paid to the topographical? 2. Is it a learning community? Does it seek out science and best research? Are the instructors encouraged to be researchers? 3. Will the students say it is a happy and challenging place to be?

15 4. Is the space one where parents and students feel respected? Has attention has been paid to symbolic and material barriers to access? 5. Does the school look like it is being cared for? Is it one where everything works? Do trades respond quickly to requests for work? 6. Do central systems facilitate excellent local practice by easing the means for excellent practice? 7. Are funding releases made at appropriate times to facilitate good financial management at the school? 8. Do departmental staff go out of their way to support a school to secure additional funds or special allocations? 9. Can managers and policy formulators anticipate the detail of implementation requirements beyond vague assurances? Conclusion Suddenly, at the same time, you see both miniature and panorama. Michel Serres (2009: 239)

I have taken a deviant route in addressing the structure-function binary posed by the topic of education and the built environment. In this concluding section, I attempt to distil the lessons, emphasising a simple point that is complex in translation. Namely, the influences in any given situation are never singular but multiple. This raises some questions. If we are agents in a network of elements – human and other – over which we have only partial control, how do we do something big like ‘close gaps’? If the elusive goal of good education is a property of the whole association of entities that includes buildings, technologies, dimensions, histories, edicts from the Board of Studies, funding emphases, welfare interventions, teachers, trainings, parents, students, and family cats at show-and-tell, where should advocacy put its energy?

In my many years of studying reform—and of why it only seems to occur against the grain and antagonistically, despite positive and ambitious policy declarations—I come back to this paradox. If ambitions for change are widely shared, why is inflexibility in systems the common experience for those at the coal face? Or to put this differently, can we imagine advocacy as less to do with vague prescriptions for closing gaps through strategies prefaced with words like

16 ‘building better…’ something; and as more to do with detailed analysis and empirical evidence? Just think: you know you are having a conversation with an expert when they can give you technical details and precision in their analyses of what they have tried and failed at. You know you are talking to a generalist when you get today’s one liners. Damage is done through imprecision about our expected effects. Which makes it something of a mystery that “detail” is often banished from planning discussions for sounding too negative, in favour of terms like ‘being strategic’ and ‘pushing the envelope’: efface the detail and you erase the capacity to change institutional habits.

This talk of networked people mediated by structures and environments is also the domain of engineers, whose task is not only that of replacing frail with stronger technology, but of intervening in the world of human errors with a precise sense of what humans are capable of. In both instances: You need to understand what you want to replace better than a mere user understands it. If you wish to build a prosthetic, you have to be able to define the function of the organ to be replaced more precisely than if you use the original. (Sloterdijk 2009)

Exactly so. If you want investments in infrastructure to facilitate better practice, understanding networks and their interconnections in as exact detail as can be managed is essential. Points for action include making life easier for those more directly tasked with creating change in the field. Acting for facilitation requires closer attention to the transactional spaces in all our workplaces: whether this be the weight of the glass doors to the principals’ reception; the friendliness of amenities within a school’s grounds; the responsiveness to requests for help from a region; the activism in backrooms to get works funded in a timely manner; the care of creating administrative forms that thoughtfully anticipate what they are actually meant to enable; or of professional skilling that is explicit about content knowledge and support systems. These are the multiple spaces for innovation and action that grand explanations or over-inflation of single potentials (such as a laptop for every student, the new facility or an attendance strategy), whilst important, tend to obscure.

17 Finally, a note on the idea of a ‘renaissance in education’. I suspect that for many, this term conjures a sense of the dawning of a brand new day of desired reform, but the term has specific other meanings. The collectors and theorists of the Renaissance saw value in heterogeneity, not as things that were incongruous or anomalous, but as an abundance that could be brought into connection. This same idea of a heterogeneous network has underpinned this paper. So, instead of thinking about what is needed in categorical terms of money, or prejudice, or political will—and sigh “if only…”; I suggest we see things in terms of networks: of pen-pushers and parents and building materials all playing a role. Many points for our active intervention into creating improved effects then assert themselves. When generalities are abandoned, we clear space for radical thinking from first principles, the Renaissance approach. We don’t have to wait for conditions in the external world to be perfect nor do we have to load responsibility for improvement onto a single thing or approach: buildings, teachers, attending students or pedagogical fad. We can act whenever we note that what we are immersed in and surrounded by could and should be otherwise.

But be warned. You take on the universe when you take on the micro.

18 References Ashenden, Dean 2009 ‘They say they want a revolution’ Inside Story published 19 February 2009 (URL to article http://inside.org.au/they-say-they-want-a- revolution).

Barker, Geoff 2002 Roebuck Primary School Consultation and Master Planning Report To: WA Education Department through Oldfield Knott Architects; Project Number: 7740204; September 2002.

Best, Michael 2005 Inspection under Section 10 of the Schools Inspection Act 1996: Rhydypenau Primary School, Fidlas Avenue, Llanishen, Cardiff, South Glamorgan. CF14 ONX: School Number: 681/2041: Date of inspection: 7-10 November 2005 Welsh Office: Crown Copyright 2006.

Bhabha, Homi 1997 ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World Berkely, Los Angeles, London: University of Califormia Press; pp 152-162.

Cameron, Laura. 2006, ‘Science, nature, and hatred: ‘finding out’ at the Malting House Garden School, 1924 – 29" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(6): 851 – 872.

Collins, Bob and Lea, Tess 1999 Learning Lessons: An Independent Inquiry into Aboriginal Education in the Northern Territory. Northern Territory Department of Education (URL to report http://www.cdu.edu.au/sspr/documents/learning_lessons_review.pdf)

Drummond, Mary J. 2000, ‘Comparisons in Early Years Education: History, Fact, and Fiction’ Early Childhood Research and Practice Vol. 2 No. 1 Spring 2000 (http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v2n1/drummond.html; accessed 4 July 2009).

Dudek, Mark. 2000, Architecture of Schools: The New Learning Environment Oxford: Architectural Press, Butterworth Heinemann.

Gardner, Dorothy E. M. 1969, Susan Isaacs. London: Methuen Education.

Isaacs, Susan. 1930, Intellectual growth in young children. London: Routledge. ______1932 (reprint 1970), The Children We Teach: Seven to Eleven Years London: University of London Press ______1933, Social Development in Young Children: A Study of Beginnings London: Routledge.

Law, John 1992 Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity, published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Notes-on-ANT.pdf

Lea, Tess 2005 ‘Learning Lessons: A Retrospective’, in Culture, Economy and Governance in Aboriginal Australia. Edited by D. Austin-Broos and G. Macdonald. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

19 Lea, Tess, N. Tootell, J. Wolgemuth, C. Halkon, and J. Douglas. 2008. Excellence or Exit: Ensuring Anangu Futures Through Education. South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services; (URL to report http://www.cdu.edu.au/sspr/documents/APYeducationreport_web.pdf)

Mellor, Susan and M. Corrigan. 2004. The Case for Change: A review of contemporary research on Indigenous education outcomes. Australian Council of Education Research Press.

Roebuck Primary School Website URL: http://www.roebuckps.det.wa.edu.au/; accessed 3 August 2009

Serres, Michel 2009 (fp 1985) The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London and New York: Continuum Books

Sloterdijk, P. 2009. Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself About the Poetics of Space. Harvard Design Magazine 1: 30, Spring/Summer 2009.

Sutton, Peter. 2009 The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of Liberal Consensus Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Walsh, Helen and T. Lea. 2008. The Funding of Indigenous Education through Special Purpose Supplementation. School for Social and Policy Research, Charles Darwin University (URL to report: www.cdu.edu.au/sspr/documents/Indigenouseducationdiscussionpaper.pdf).

Williams, Graham 1866, A Short Account of the British Encampments, Lying Between the Rivers Rheidol and Llyfnant Oxford University (digitized 20 April 2007).

20