OECD Work on Future Educational Environments

Designing school buildings to respond to change is not a new idea. But perhaps what is differenttoday is the kind and degree of change which we have to anticipate. The OECD is carrying outprojects that can help in the planning and design of future educational facilities – exploringtrends in education and studying innovative learning environments.Education planners have long grappled with the type of change connected with demography,for example changing local patterns in the number of school places needed over a period oftime. But new challenges lie in the complexity and uncertainty which are characteristic of the21st century world.The findings of the OECD’s project “Schooling for Tomorrow: Trends Shaping Education” showsome sources of this uncertainty, including falling birth rates, increasing economic globalisationand growing numbers of single parent families. Such issues suggest that policy makers andeducation providers alike need to address questions about what education is and how it shouldbe delivered.Another OECD project, a study of innovative learning environments, is looking at how schools canrespond to changes in the type of teaching and learning that make individuals lifelong learners.Developing individuals as self-directed learners, who are able to acquire expert knowledge indifferent fields and to change careers, benefits the economy and society generally.Research into learning shows both the importance of allowing students to take control of theirown learning and that learning must be a social, cultural, intrapersonal and an active process.Research also demonstrates that an understanding of complex subjects can be best achievedin settings where the learner is engaged with others in the community, in activities whereknowledge is being applied.The learning environments that support this must be fundamentally different from what has gonebefore, with less emphasis on teachers addressing a group of students in a traditional classroomsetting. However, just how the physical environment must respond is a complicated issue. Tomeet the needs of 21st century learning, the physical environment will have to be agile so thatit is capable of providing a mixed range of learning settings from large group spaces to smaller,more individual tutorial type spaces. However, the interaction between a building’s users andthe physical infrastructure is complex. The physical environment is always a constraint, but akey question might be to what extent does it offer the teachers the freedom and empowermentto do with it what they want. The different learning settings may be facilitated by clever use offurniture which can be easily rearranged in a variety of ways thus providing a range of spaceswithin spaces. These are all issues that future work of the Programme on Educational Building willexplore further, building on the current OECD work on innovative learning environments.