The story of post-war school building.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Education
Date:
1957
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The story of post-war school building. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    noise, smells and complicated services, and a dining room or large open space to be used communally for meals. These facilities were not norm- ally provided in pre-war schools and their presence alters in significant ways the size, appearance, function and cost of the modern school building. The school meals service has been regarded by all govern- ments as an essential part of the country’s social policy while at the same time offering opportunities of social training for the children. In short, it is part of the process of education. 39. Taken together, these changes in the process of education—the diversity of subject, the variety of teaching methods and materials, the variable size of the actual teaching group and the wider scope of school life—cannot but affect our idea about the sort of schools we should build. If we are to meet the needs which these changes are creating we cannot avoid the facts that: (1) post-war schools will need more room in total than pre-war ones; (2) post-war schools will need more individual spaces than pre-war ones; 7 (3) these individual spaces will not be of uniform size, but of many different sizes and shapes; (4) some of the spaces will be for quiet and clean activities, others for noisy and dirty ones. The tools to be used may be pens, needles, chisels, lathes, pianos or vaulting horses. There is thus a need for very different physical conditions in different spaces; (5) these spaces must be adaptable not only to a present variety of uses, but also to the changes which the future is bound to bring, sometimes suddenly, sometimes imperceptibly; (6) these spaces are designed for children. A primary school is designed for people who cannot look down on or through anything that is more than about three feet six inches above ground level, or reach anything comfortably more than five feet above ground level. The scale of a school building should be, and today generally is, quite different from that in buildings used only by adults. 40. Is all this to ask for the moon? The answer of the post-war school building record is that all these things are essential if reasonable educational needs are to be met, and that they can be achieved with economy if skill, imagination and hard work are brought to the problem