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Leading sustainable school buildings project

The project

This NCSL study aimed to identify and develop the skills and knowledge required by school leaders to lead sustainable building projects.

The study adopted the Education and Skills Select Committee's dual definition of 'sustainable':

Sustainable learning - environments that will remain fit for purpose for learning into the 21st Century
Sustainable environments - environments that minimise the impact on the biosphere.

In many ways these two overlap, for example, where the physical environment provides opportunities for pupils to learn about environmental sustainability, covering a range of curriculum areas in the process.

The objectives for the research were to:

engage with the current and emerging policy agenda in this area, so that the research and recommendations are appropriately contextualised
engage with and build on existing research about effective school leadership and leadership development
identify and summarise existing relevant research and thinking from education or other fields
conduct research with a sample of leaders from primary and secondary schools with current or recent experience of leading capital projects to address the questions raised
identify the different roles taken by school leaders such as the headteacher or school business manager, and how these interrelate
make recommendations for school leaders and NCSL on how to take this forward, including NCSL's current Building Schools for the Future (BSF) Leadership Programme.

The Leading Sustainable School Building Projects report

Download a copy of the report.

Background

If 'sustainable schools' are to become a reality, it will require sustained and systematic culture change within schools, since new buildings will achieve little on their own if there are not changes in working practices and systems.

In response to these concerns, NCSL was asked to develop a BSF Leadership Programme to support school leaders through the BSF process and has been piloting this since 2006.

Since the launch of BSF, there has been a focus on its potential to transform learning, and debate about how best this can be done. This is partly down to the fact that we simply cannot predict what learning will look like in 20, or even 10 years' time and therefore it is difficult to design buildings that are truly future proof.

Given that few new schools have been built for two decades prior to 1997 there is, not surprisingly, a lack of expertise in this area of work. Ten years later we have many more school leaders with experience of leading building projects and many more will need to lead building projects in the next 15 years.

It is an urgent priority therefore, to understand what skills and knowledge are required to do this successfully. At present, we are not aware of any research on this topic from the UK or abroad, although NCSL has completed interviews with a small number of leaders involved in BSF ,which provides a starting point.

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