Back to school

Of course schools will continue to be built, despite the government’s embarrassingly messy abandonment of the BSF programme. But not so many, and with a greater emphasis on refurbishment.

Nobody likes the lost workload, but there’s a broader issue. RIBA president Ruth Reed took the right line in her article in The Times, singling out the Ruritanian madness of the BSF system, which the Institute has long criticised.  ‘Colossal investment and huge hopes brought only questionable returns and disarray. It is right to abandon it. We would rather architects do less wasted work… this would result in schools that cost much less, being open in half the time.’

The BSF programme represented no golden age, as any architect involved in the process knows. Not only were the contract values of BSF schools much reduced compared with the preceding academies programme, but the whole bidding process for the schools ate up time and money (and favoured larger practices) before anything at all started to happen on site. Work was wasted if you lost, or if you won. Architects found themselves at the mercy of cost-cutting exercises as their paymasters tried to recoup the enormous costs of getting to first base. And as we know from a hand-wringing Cabe, the end quality of the schools emerging from the system was poor overall, and in some instances disgraceful, despite the handful of better schemes that make it to the awards lists.

So this issue of RIBAJ is no end-of-an-era lament. We take a realistic view, both of what has been built and what is to come.  But the right kind of waste needs to be cut: bureaucratic fat, not good, lean design.

Keep on learning
The RIBA is a significant provider of career educational material itself. So we welcome the Learning Channels to these pages –you’ll find them on the inside back cover. Run under the aegis of its NBS subsidiary, these are some of the Institute’s valuable resources along with its CPD lectures, training courses, conferences and seminars. They are there to be used.

Hugh Pearman | Editor