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Building Schools for the Future

My Lords, the Secretary of State has quarrelled not only with local authorities but also with architects. Can we hope that we will not hear a repeat of the diatribe he launched against architects at the Free Schools conference? It was a diatribe that was particularly ill judged, as he commented individually on my noble friend Lord Rogers. After all, it is widely accepted that the design of the Mossbourne Academy by my noble friend did contribute to the transformation of academic achievement there. If the Secretary of State is turning over a new leaf in this regard, will he listen carefully to what has been said by Sunand Prasad, the former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who is not entirely opposed to the new approach that the Secretary of State wishes to adopt? He sees a place for templates, prefabricated parts and repeated designs, but has advised that you still have to take account of site, locality and context. Surely that is important in relation to the Government’s own aspirations for a new localism. Does he expect that people, within their localities, will take kindly to having designs centrally imposed upon them? Can we learn the lessons from the Building Schools for the Future programme? Can we also learn the lessons from the Australian experiment, which is rather more akin to the approach that the Government intend to adopt and which, although it has its limitations, has been partially successful? Finally, does he recognise that schools historically have been built as statements of civic and community values, and that if you impose central, standardised and banal designs of the kind epitomised across the country by Tesco and Dixon’s, whose representatives are advising the Secretary of State, then you will be falling short in your responsibilities?