Future commitments
Our objective for this research was to work collaboratively to enhance the pathway for SEND school design and delivery to improve the lives of young people, teachers, carers and families.
Our qualitative research has helped to identify where we are now, but also enabled us to envision what the future might hold for the sector.
One clear theme which emerged from these conversations, was a universal acknowledgement of the need for formalised platforms to enable knowledge sharing and insights-led learning.
This forum would highlight best practice, facilitate learning, and assist with benchmarking – creating an open collaborative platform between users to support best practice.
This would provide opportunities for end users in particular to come together and share their experiences, creating a blueprint for success that could be replicated by similar schools and help to support outstanding delivery for every single SEND project.
The creation of a Headteacher’s Handbook, will bring together insights and feedback from headteachers, procurers, commissioners, and school designers and contractors into a single, easy-read guide.
This document will outline best practice in commissioning school buildings and will contain tips and insights from headteachers who have experience commissioning and overseeing the design and construction of SEND schools, enabling fellow headteachers a running start on schemes upon which they are about to embark. The handbook will also feature insights from experts in the built environment, procurement professionals, and commissioning experts.
Having delivered a number of SEND projects in the East of England alone, we believe it is our duty to support the users beyond the build.
We plan to take this one step further, by revisiting the schools to analyse user experience, design effectiveness and lessons learned.
Our teams will explore how it is performing for school users, and look at factors including what teachers, young people and users would change about the school.
We will also assess how their experience can help inform future design considerations.
In addition to achieving this through Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) by returning to the school to explore how the school is performing, we will also host dedicated ‘lessons learned‘ workshops immediately following handover to capture initial feedback.
This commitment will see our team create a best practice guide developed from user experience intelligence that informs how buildings are performing as the cohort changes.
We hope that these can then be applied to future projects, making sure we continue to improve the pathway for SEND school design and delivery.
