Firstly there is the worry about disruption. How long will the gap be between the end of the use of the old building and taking on the new? A term? Two terms? What will the school do in the interim? How secure will the resultant building site be? Put it another way: “how will we cope”?

Secondly there is the question of improvement. Yes, the existing building is damp, too small, overheated in the summer, crumbling, inappropriately proportioned… But will the new one be better? Too many teachers and managers have worked in schools that were built wholly inappropriately in the 70s and 80s for there to be a belief among educationalists that builders know what they are doing when it comes to schools.

Which leads to the most worrying outcome: six months of teaching on a building site, with all the disruption that entails, only to find you end up in a building which is no better than the one that has been demolished.

Having been in the building business for forty years, I watched the last school building boom in horror. But now, at last, I do believe things have started to change.

The most sensible building contractors have now stopped producing inappropriate drawings of grand sweeping atriums in which 13 year olds chat and study calmly in small groups amidst the potted plants (without any teacher in sight). Now we are talking practicalities: designing a building in such a way that of itself it greatly enhances the quality of teaching and learning, and then erecting it during the school holidays, without disrupting anyone.

To deal with installation first. The target of “No Disruption” has been achieved by fabricating much of the building off-site in pre-fabricated elements which, once the pupils have departed for the summer, are brought onto the school site and assembled.

It is important to remember that the phrase “pre-fabricated” does not mean “temporary”. “Pre-fabrication” is a style of construction, which has nothing to do with longevity – buildings built using this method can and will last as long as buildings constructed through a traditional (but in the case of schools, inappropriate) “build on site” approach. Pre-fabricated also no longer need mean claustrophobic portable cabin complexes with low ceilings and little light.

As to the teaching and learning – a survey of over 20,000 schools in the USA in the 1990s showed that sky-lit buildings with no ground level windows generate much improved educational results. These findings have been used extensively in the United States to reform school building, but sadly the UK has taken a number of years to catch up with this breakthrough.

Yet it is very easy to see how and why sky-lit buildings produce so much better results: overheating from direct sunlight is avoided, reflection on whiteboards and computer screens is eliminated: and the distraction of pupils who look at events taking place outside is removed. There is even a huge reduction in break-ins – because most thefts involve using ground level windows as a point of entry and/or exit.

Well-oriented sky-lit buildings can also be very “green”, as flat natural light avoids heat build-up while eliminating the need for daytime lighting.

Fortunately, sky-lit buildings can be produced in such a way that they can be installed during the school summer break, and they can be produced on a building by building basis, at a cost considerably lower than traditional approaches.

So far my company, Conport Structures Ltd, has been installing sky-lit buildings for the most part in colleges and universities (such as The Arts Institute at Bournemouth and London’s University of the Arts), but it is clear that this year a number of schools are seriously considering using the summer to replace a building with a sky-lit structure.

Thus I am hopeful that this will be the summer in which the whole notion of rebuilding schools changes once and for all.

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