About S4PL

In 2008 the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) set up a project to understand the relationship between the school environment and fundamental shifts in education that were rapidly establishing themselves as a priority, globally.

The aim was for the project, Space for Personalised Learning, to identify the spatial features that supported schools in their ability to deliver the new ways of learning and make widely available detailed information on the design interventions - and the ways of arriving at them - that had been shown to achieve the desired change.

Experts in design strategy, education, architecture, research and technology were assembled in a multidisciplinary management team that between 2008 and 2010 worked closely with ten pilot schools selected as research subjects.

The project proceeds from the conviction that certain shifts in society, including the very fundamental move from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy, have pressing pedagogical and spatial implications that must be understood and met. It adopts the term personalised learning to characterize the new ways of thinking and acting clustered round these little-understood implications. It asks: How do we go about creating a physical environment that delivers education on the universal scale demanded - and yet allows schools to implement systems and structures that provide a more customized experience for young people?

For two-and-a-half years a multidisciplinary team - educationists, design strategists, architects, research scientists and technologists - worked closely with the ten schools, all actively engaged in the transition from old to new ways of learning and teaching.

The practical material and intellectual property derived from this relationship led to a series of suggested interventions specific to the circumstances of the contributing schools, but the primary value of the project - and its intended emphasis - lies in the way in which an extremely iterative process was shown to be capable of exposing design truths robust enough to be applicable across the whole education sector.

This site compiles the output, including a final summary report, an interactive guide to the design process used by the team, facilitator guides and tools, and raw output files from the various pilot projects.