Our cities are facing challenges in how to accommodate an increasing population. More school places are needed than ever before but land is in short supply and funding can be limited. In our upcoming book ‘Urban Schools: Designing for High Density’, experts examine how the city can continue to provide the best education experience for children when space is tight.

Case studies from around the world, as well as historic examples, are used to explore the educational, architectural, planning, construction and regulatory context that is driving this new wave of school designs.

Our intent is to share the successes and help the education design world learn the key lessons to enable them to deliver new solutions that meet the needs of children now and in the future. In doing so we have identified the opportunities and challenges for integrating these new approaches into the city. We hope this book will be useful to educators, designers and policy makers as they look for new ways to tackle the challenges ahead.

We conclude that schools must enhance the urban fabric of the cities in which they sit. There are fantastic possibilities but also challenges that we need to address collectively if we are to successfully deliver new types of educational architecture and the best possible learning spaces.

Delivering more for less is not easy. Many of the approaches below would not be the preferred choice of how to accommodate school places. But they can still result in excellent spaces for high quality education.

Issues which impact design

We need to move away from a fixed view of what a school is and consider the following:

• Technology can be harnessed to allow more flexible approaches to learning in the city, including 24/7 learning in a variety of settings.
  
  
• Schools can think differently about how they organise and deliver the curriculum.
  
  
• Buildings can be transformed from offices and shops to have a new educational purpose.
  
  
• Schools are not just academic factories but places where young people engage and gather a wide range of experiences that will inform and equip them for adult life.
  
  
• The ability for students to socialise and learn in outdoor spaces is increasingly recognised as important for their wellbeing and should be a priority but rarely is. We should maximise access to parks and open spaces to provide enriching educational and social experiences for young people.

Other key themes around which to focus future discussions include:

• collaboration where educational and design innovation move forward in tandem.  
  
  
• how to construct new schools on tight urban sites through creative design, repurposing existing buildings and using cost effective materials and modern methods of construction.
  
  

The importance of co-location

Questioning how education can be delivered to better serve communities is a subject that is relevant beyond urban environments. Around the UK there are excellent examples of co-location of schools on less constrained shared sites.

These approaches not only make best use of available land, they also serve a range of additional purposes:

• A secondary school sharing its building with a further education college can ensure young people can access vocational education more effectively.
  
  
• Small rural schools can come together to provide a wider range of specialist teaching than they could deliver individually.
  
  
• Bringing schools of different faiths onto one site can lead the way in creating understanding and common space for divided communities.
  
  

Safeguarding will always be a priority for schools, even to the point that it can blinker us to new solutions. When budgets are tight we should not be delivering buildings that will be expensive to run or maintain either now or in the future.

Education is dynamic and will continue to change and be influenced by its location and political context. But regardless of the economic and political context, the collective drive to enhance the experience for the child and improve their environment will remain and ensure our educators, designers, and builders will continue to collaborate and innovate. Our policy makers can support this important ambition by ensuring that the procurement and legislative context enables these new approaches.

This book does not assume that every site or existing building can accommodate a mixed use development or high rise school but rather challenges our thinking about how we can continue to find new solutions in our cities.