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Plowden and Primary School Buildings: a story of innovation without change

2007; Lawrence and Wishart; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2304/forum.2007.49.1.55

0963-8253

Mike Brogden,

Architecture, Design, and Social History

The Plowden Report encouraged the design of more compact and flexible school buildings to accommodate its vision of child-centred teaching.These schools came to be known as 'open plan'.By the late 1970s about 10% of schools were of open-plan design but researchers found serious weaknesses in the quality of their work.Plowden's ideals were not often to be found in practice in open-plan schools.Changes in teaching methodologies had not kept pace with innovation in school design and the rhetoric of child-centredness was not matched by the reality of the experience of many primary pupils.The explanations for this include the conservatism of teachers as well as the propensity to failure of centrally imposed ideas.The Plowden Report (Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967) had quite a lot to say about school buildings.Chapter 28, 'Primary School Buildings and Equipment', began by examining 'serious deficiencies'.Local education authorities were not building enough new schools to keep pace with the demands of a growing population, let alone replacing or improving old stock.The 'really poor' conditions included schools without electricity or hot water or water-borne sanitation or having no hall.Said Plowden, 'There may be a good school without good buildings, though this is no excuse for the deplorable conditions in which many children are educated ' (para.1234).Until the mid-1950s, new primary schools were often designed on the 'finger plan' in which long corridors of classrooms radiated out from central cloakrooms, lavatories, the hall and (the ultimate in space-wasting luxury) a dining room.The design of these buildings was akin to pre-war elementary schooling in which medical advice on the health benefits of cross-ventilation and folding external doors was the priority.Pedagogic principles were scant; the not very large 'box classrooms' reflected a view of the homogeneity of year groups and of trained, and therefore autonomous, teachers who could work at a distance from the head's office in their largely didactic style with passive pupils.