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Editorial advisory panel Laurence Aston, Director, Buro Happold


David Clark, Partner, Max Fordham Consulting Engineers


Patrick Conaghan, Partner, Hoare Lea Consulting Engineers


David Hughes, Building Services Consultant, MTT Consulting Philip King, Director, Hilson Moran


Chani Leahong, Senior Associate, Fulcrum Consulting


Alan Tulla, President, The Society of Light and Lighting


Professor John Swaffield, CIBSE Past President


Ged Tyrrell, Managing Director, Tyrrell Systems Ant Wilson, Director, AECOM Morwenna Wilson, Graduate Engineer, Arup Terry Wyatt, Consultant to Hoare Lea


Christopher Pountney, Graduate Engineer, AECOM


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Cover: Photo courtesy of British Land


From the editor


Lessons learnt, lessons lost B


uilding Schools for the Future (BSF) was very far from perfect, and Education Secretary Michael Gove was right to point to faults in the scheme, which


in some instances included delays, overspends and, yes, some ‘needless bureaucracy’. But was this any reasonable basis for scrapping it altogether, when there was room for achievable improvement? In announcing the end of BSF, Gove also cancelled 735 school projects that had been agreed under it (see our news and news analysis this month). This decision wasn’t about ridding the nation of a useless or corrupt building-improvement programme; it was primarily about seizing an opportunity to save tens of billions of pounds in one fell swoop. Gove has suggested that


he does indeed still want a schools infrastructure that is top class. And it seems that we will still see, in the future, capital investment in schools. The Department for Education (DfE) and Partnership for Schools, the body that oversaw BSF, will work together on reviewing this area. But this isn’t a government bent on investing


Another major lost opportunity from


Scrapping BSF was


really about saving tens of billions of pounds in one fell swoop


BSF’s demise is an engineering-learning one. Designers, engineers, architects and other professionals who have contributed to the devising and building of whole new schools in recent years have provided many important lessons on how to get these challenging and complex environments ‘right’. These lessons won’t be lost altogether, of course, but the incentive and desire to push for design innovation and creative engineering solutions could well disappear under the government’s low-cost approach to improving school premises. One lesson that building professionals can pass on to ministers, free of charge, is that good buildings are built for good clients – those who are demanding and challenging, and who are prepared to invest in innovation (which can mean low-cost ‘passive’ solutions as well as complex gadgetry). So our question to Gove is: with the loss of BSF, how will the government ensure


it is a good client who can foster energy efficient and suitably healthy and comfortable learning environments for the next generation (on whom we will depend for a healthy GDP)? Let’s now hope that many of the BSF projects


ABC audited circulation: 19,728 January to December 2009


in public services any time soon. Meanwhile there are hundreds of schools that are – and will remain – unsuitable learning environments; there is plenty of evidence to show the improved learning outcomes gained from better school buildings, particularly from ventilation system technology. Meanwhile this green-tinged coalition government continues to press carbon-cutting targets on the public sector. It would be very useful to calculate the impact of the loss of investment in more efficient buildings on the sector’s overall carbon footprint.


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that have been placed in limbo – 151 schemes under review might or might not face closure – will be reprieved. This is not an issue of pumping more public money unnecessarily into the construction sector just because it is in the doldrums – it is a question of investing for the future. BSF wasn’t broken; it could have been fixed. But now that it is gone, the construction industry as a whole must demand that a new, improved version be devised, and soon.


Bob Cervi, Editor bcervi@cibsejournal.com August 2010 CIBSE Journal 5


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