Kids designing schools

Lisa sent me this link this morning called Schools our kids would build.
The article describes the historical development of school design, then describes some of the findings that emerged from the “Schools I’d Like” competetion run in the UK, producing dozens of models, hundreds of plans, and thousands of implied designs of ideal sites for learning, all submitted by children and young people. The article reports…

These design ideas address more than the shape of building and the ordering of spaces; they tell of a vision of education that reaches beyond the strict mechanics of building science. The children seem to want schools not to resemble schools at all, but to resemble the adult world where individual privacy, comfort, and relaxation were permitted.

Perhaps we could do something like that in NZ to help inform the development of thought from our own secondary futures project, or the Ministry’s NZ Schooling Strategy work, currently out for consultation.
Take a peek also at the photographs and information about Contemporary School Building Design in NZ on the MoE website – it would be useful to consider wher the alignment might be between what our students suggest and these examples??