Report author berates lack of improvement in school design

The James Review has said the design standards successfully lobbied for by Cabe on the £55 billion Building Schools for the Future programme did not work.

So-called Minimum Design Standards were introduced in 2009 after Cabe told the education department and Partnership for Schools, which ran the BSF programme, that the early BSF designs it had seen were not good enough.

Following their introduction, schools had to receive a “pass” or “very good” mark judged against 10 criteria set by Cabe.

But in his report into the future of school procurement post-BSF, James said: “These design standards had little effect. Given the large numbers of schemes, it is reasonable to assume that a body of best practice would develop and examples of poor design would reduce.

“However, despite work on this by Cabe and others there is little evidence that this happened.”

James said poor design was often not the fault of the designers themselves but a symptom of the design brief.

But he said too many designs were still below par after 2009, which showed Cabe’s design standards were not being heeded.

He added: “The lack of consistency in the quality of designs put forward over time demonstrates an absence of continuous improvement across the sector.”