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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    schools take more time and resources to build than primary schools, the next few years may well prove the most difficult. 4, Chapter II discusses the kind of schools we ought to build and stresses the point that this will depend upon our current ideas of the aims and methods of education. These ideas have changed substantially since before the war. We now hold that there should be different kinds of schools to provide for variety in the ages, aptitudes and abilities of children themselves and to suit local circumstances. Further, the post- war school should be designed to offer a wider range of subjects than in the past. A great emphasis is now laid on practical activities. Again, teachers wish to break down the class or form unit into several smaller working groups, each following a different aspect of a subject. This variety of subject and approach necessarily calls for new kinds of teaching materials, aids and equipment. Finally, we see a school no longer as a mere machine for giving lessons, but as a social unit con- cerned with the all-round development of boys and girls. For example, in practically every school there is provision for school meals which requires special planning by the architect. 5. All these trends are in the direction of securing greater opportunity for individual children. Accept this as reasonable and we must accept also that schools, if they are to provide for this variety, are likely to need more space and rooms so that the building is adaptable to many uses and must be scientifically designed for children and not for adults. 6. We thus face the dilemma that we want not only an unprecedented number of new schools, but also better planned schools and, on the face of it, more expensive schools. Chapter III shows how we tackled the problem of achieving these objects at a reasonable cost. School building had to come to a stop during the war. The staffs of architects and draughtsmen had to be got together again. These professional teams had to be built up so that they could cope in time, not only with the immediate tasks of repairing war damaged schools and preparing for the raising of the school leaving age, but also with the large scale programmes of new school building which lay ahead. 7. Chapter III describes the conditions that are essential to success. We had to know where and what to build first. This was made possible by the preparation by local education authorities of development plans for their areas and by drawing up annual programmes of projects sufficiently well in advance to allow of adequate preparation before building had to start. We had to ensure that each project came up to the