... and me.<\/p>\n
We all met at Bristol's Create Centre last week as part of a panel to discuss the idea of the sustainable school from the perspective of building design, construction and operation. \u00a0This was part of the Bristol Architecture Centre's Spring Green<\/a> programme which extends into the summer through a number of varied events.<\/p>\n We each contributed 10 minutes of thoughts from our veery different perspectives, and this was followed by 75 minutes of discussion with the audience. \u00a0All in all, a well put together evening, I felt, and I certainly gained new perspectives on BSF<\/a> and BREEAM<\/a>, and on what could be achieved in a new-build school. \u00a0There was a gloomy view about the future of new builds following the dispiriting James Report<\/a> [which I have blogged on previously<\/a>]. \u00a0Not quite back to the 60s (some standards have improved over time), but not building on the very best we can aspire to and achieve, either. \u00a0What a crying shame that such stunted vision has now come to the fore.<\/p>\n I should say that everyone's powerpoint slides except mine were full of nice pictures of fine schools and colourful, sweeping graphs \u2014 but they weren't all sweeping in the right direction: a lot of the electricity usage graph gradients were positive rather than negative, for example, which is all very embarrassing, and some new builds had worse energy performances than somewhat older ones. \u00a0Well, here's what I had: only one slide which tried to provide a critical summary of \u00a0the experience of the sustainable schools initiative in 7 easy points:<\/p>\n The positives \u2026 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0But \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n 1\u00a0 An atmosphere of permission \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0there has been no coherence across government departments<\/p>\n 2\u00a0 Language that resonated \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0the doorway metaphor was too limited to carry the burden expected of it<\/p>\n 3\u00a0 Strong vision; useful guidance \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0there was a focus on parts, not the whole<\/p>\n 4\u00a0 No prescription, targets, or funding \u00a0 \u00a0the evaluative criteria were useless for what was needed<\/p>\n 5\u00a0 An emphasis on learning & change \u00a0 \u00a0this was too individually-focused, at the expense of the social<\/p>\n 6\u00a0 Strong agency support \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0there was too much focus on behaviour<\/p>\n 7\u00a0 The idea of a sustainable school \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 what does it mean?<\/p>\n ................................................................................................<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ... and me. We all met at Bristol's Create Centre last week as part of a panel to discuss the idea of the sustainable school from the perspective of building design, construction and operation. \u00a0This was part of the Bristol...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks-and-presentations"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}