By Ronald Eglin

The education of our youth is the foundation upon which to build our future. In order to develop our youth we need to spend far more money and resources on improving the quality of our teachers; developing appropriate and effective education curricula; and creating spaces and places that foster and support learning. 

Much is being discussed and said about improving the quality of our teachers and curriculum, but not much attention is being given to improving our physical learning environments. Little attention has been given to what these learning environments look like and where they are distributed in space and time. Spatial planning principles and architectural designs for our schools and education institutions have not changed much since the dawn of our democracy.   

We need to consider more creative and innovative approaches to address the education challenges that we face. The thoughts expressed herein are meant to open up debate on what we want our schools and education facilities to look like.

Learning environments are defined as places and settings where learning occurs. These are not limited to a physical classroom, but include all the characteristics of that setting.  Education facilities, as discussed in this article, range from higher order facilities like universities, through middle order facilities like high schools and primary schools, to lower order facilities like crèches. 

The Provincial Department of Education is aware of the need for more educational facilities, and they claim to have plans for the development of these facilities. However, the Department is frank in acknowledging that the annual allocations, amounting to, for example, R981 million for the 2009/10 financial year, is nowhere near the total required to completely overcome the infrastructure backlog, especially the mud schools scattered throughout the former Transkei.

The Eastern Cape Department of Education’s budget for school building is being slashed each year, and funding earmarked for infrastructure and facilities is being used for staffing and other running costs. The Sunday Times reported in October 2010 that, according to an investigative report for the Provincial Department of Education, by the end this financial year on March 31 2011 the Department would be R1.9-billion in the red.  The report recommended freezing infrastructure programmes, including the building of schools, and a moratorium on filling 1400 vacant teachers posts to save at least R900 000 of projected spending until the end of the financial year.” 

This paper does not explore the challenges faced by government in implementing existing plans for schools, but poses and begins to explore the question: Are the plans that have been developed appropriate for creating quality spatial learning environments for learners? 

Urban planners have long lamented that from a spatial planning point of view our suburbs and townships are being built at densities that are too low. This means that children have to travel large distances to get to school. Learners have to struggle to travel to and from schools, having to rely on parents, lifts and other methods. Rural villages and peri-urban areas are expanding at even lower densities exacerbating this problem.

The concept of a village being a small concentrated hub of residential and other buildings surrounded by agricultural lands is no longer what is found in communal rural areas. Rural villages can now be seen as sprawling low density settlements.  
The low density of settlement areas is compounded by the setting aside of large spaces for educational facilities within new neighbourhood developments. The learning facilities that are being built are being built for larger and larger numbers of learners, meaning that there are fewer facilities spaced further apart from each other, again increasing the distance between learners and educational facilities. 

Many schools and education facilities stand empty when schools are not being used, wasting a significant public investment that is not being used to its maximum potential.  School grounds are locked up and underutilised most of the time. School properties are fenced off from their neighbourhoods making it difficult for these spaces to be used for other non-education activities, like community recreational facilities and spaces, community meetings, adult education, community gardens, etc. 

The activity of learning is seen as something that only occurs within specially defined educational learning spaces.  It appears no thought is given to how spaces like bus stops, community parks, streets, shopping centres, small business centres, post offices, etc., can become part of the space wherein both formal and informal learning can take place. A lot of learning occurs when youngsters and youth see and copy what adults and the more learned members of the society do. All environments need to be understood as learning environments, where people have opportunities to learn, see what others do, be taught things, and have opportunities to try things out.

Education as the Heart of Community

Education facilities can become the heart of the neighbourhood within which they are located.    Education facilities (especially schools) should function as anchors for neighbourhood development.   Neighbourhoods are places where pupils, educators and parents mingle, get to know each other and build a sense of community.  Many social networks are built through the social relations made by households through their children.  

According to work done in the United States of America, “schools that serve as centres of community are making notable improvements in four areas:
•    Student learning. Students demonstrate significant gains in academic achievement and in essential areas of non-academic development.
•    School effectiveness. Parent-teacher relationships are stronger and teacher satisfaction is higher. There is a more positive school environment and broader community support.
•    Family engagement. Families show greater stability. Parents communicate more often with teachers, are more involved in school activities, and demonstrate a greater sense of responsibility for their children’s learning success.
•    Community vitality. Surrounding neighbourhoods enjoy increased security, heightened community pride, and better rapport among students and residents. The schools themselves are more intensively used.” 

This repositioning of education facilities at the heart of neighbourhood development requires radical new thinking in how we conceptualise education facilities and schools. The core of this new thinking is the concept of clustering.  

The draft Eastern Cape Provincial Spatial Development Plan includes the concept of focus areas as a key component of future spatial planning.  The idea of focus areas is to achieve “‘shared impact’ between all stakeholders, through identifying focus areas where multi-sectorial programmes of diverse projects can be implemented and developed in synergy between sector departments, parastatal organisations, public entities, and municipalities.” Educational facilities can play a significant role in influencing the form these shared impact focus areas can take. 

The so-called Red Book produced by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) also promotes the concept of facility clustering.    Two types of clustering are identified:
•    Multi-purpose facility clusters, where a range of services (health, recreation, education, municipal administration, police, etc.) are located in close proximity; and
•    Functional clusters, where educationally related services are clustered together. For example, a hub of specialised services (woodworking, computer centres, science labs, administration services, etc.) is created where these services are shared between educational institutions.    

Some facilities lend themselves to being clustered (like libraries, schools, adult learning centres, etc.), while other facilities are harder to cluster in close proximity to each other (like crèches, cemeteries, police stations, etc.).  

This clustering, as proposed in the Red Book, is not occurring. From a multi-purpose clustering point of view, schools continue to be planned in isolation to other community facilities; and from a functional clustering point of view, there is still a mentality that each school must be its own self- contained ‘island’. This leads to a problem of schools competing with each other for limited resources. Far more cooperation is needed both between the education department and other departments and between different educational establishments. 

Planning Learning Environments

The following section provides a number of suggestions, from a spatial planning point of view, as to what can be done to create better performing learning environments. 

We need to ‘atomise’ education facilities. In other words, we need to pull apart all the spaces that make up educational facilities so that we can put them together in new and creative ways. This starts by redefining what elements (or atoms) make up educational facilities including classrooms, administrative offices, halls, sports fields, computer laboratories, woodworking and metalworking workshops, libraries, parking lots, etc.   

When it comes to putting these facilities back again, they can be shared by different schools, and/or they can be shared between different institutions or sectors. Schools need to become far more extrovert in their orientation to their neighbourhood. This means that we need to pull down the figurative walls around schools, and in many instances, literally. The type of sharing that can occur includes:
•    Different schools can share computer laboratories and sports fields;
•    Adult learning institutions can use classrooms at night;
•    The Department of Social Welfare can use halls for pension payouts;
•    The Department of Agriculture can use unused land for community gardens;
•    The Department of Health can use parking areas for mobile clinics; 
•    Local community sporting codes can use school sports facilities when not being used by schools; 
•    Business can make their computers, woodworking equipment, etc., available for pupils to undertake extra lessons; and
•    Offices or libraries or any other space with access to electricity can become a reading room for learners to learn at night away from home distractions.  

We need to create a much finer grained urban fabric with education facilities within a mosaic of schools, clinics, farms, businesses, factories, houses, etc. Gone are the days were we should have large pieces of land set aside for different things in different areas. This fine grained pattern will be achieved by putting atomised schools back together in new and innovative ways. 

Public transport needs to be linked far more closely with the location of these educational facilities.  Clusters of educational facilities will make it far easier for public busses and other public transport modes to find routes through these clusters. It will be easier for government to create pedestrian and cycle paths through a clustered array of educational facilities. Schools will be more accessible to students if they are better tied into the public transport network. 

Schools’ classrooms and actual schools can also be made smaller if they are part of a cluster of schools all sharing different educational facilities.  According to the New Rules Project website, “hundreds of studies have found that students who attend small schools outperform those in large schools on every academic measure from grades to test scores. They are less likely to dropout and more likely to attend college.  Small schools also build strong communities. Parents and neighbours are more likely to be actively involved in the school. The students benefit from community support and the school in turn fosters connections among neighbours and encourages civic participation.”   Smaller schools and classrooms will mean more teachers and administrators, but this can be addressed, especially the administrators – if administration is shared. 

With modern technology, there are many opportunities to de-spatialise education. Any space that has access to electricity and is relatively quiet and safe can become a space for learning. Teachers located at one point can stream lessons over the internet to students in other places. The internet provides many opportunities for students to access hordes of information over the world-wide-web. Scientific and other forms of laboratories and workshops can be established within mobile facilities allowing the facility to move on a rotating basis to where students are found.

At a regional level, tertiary institutions need to consider developing different specialisations and creating district educational clusters. Not all tertiary education facilities can offer the same curriculum–they need to find and develop their own niches. Agricultural colleges with working relationships with agricultural businesses can be located in areas of high agricultural potential.  Science colleges with relationships with the energy and motor industry, for example, can be linked to industrial development zones. Tourism colleges with links to the tourism sector can be located in areas of high tourism potential (like coastal areas and areas with large numbers of game reserves). Public and financial administration educational institutions linked to government and business can be located near centres of public administration. 

Conclusions

All of the above recommendations require our education and planning officials to promote the concept of clustering. Clustering will require high levels of coordination between department and educational institutions. The rebranding of the Department of Housing to the Department of Human Settlements provides an opportunity for this department to take a leading role in the promotion of clustering.  Other departments, like education, health, transport, etc., however, need to open up to being led by this department so that the necessary coordination can occur.  

The government cannot go on spending money on different activities, like crèches, adult education classes, clinics, school sports, community sports, community gardens, small business incubators, school laboratories, etc., without seriously looking at how these activities can share spaces in space and time. We just don’t have the money to provide each activity with its own space. 

By adopting many of the recommendations proposed in this paper, government will save itself resources. Investment costs in infrastructure and educational facilities will be reduced as these facilities can be used by a range of role-players from local sports clubs, adult education classes, cultural institutions, to gardeners and emerging businesses. Transport costs will also be significantly reduced saving government and household’s money. The environment will also benefit as greenhouse gas emissions from the transport industry are reduced.    

One more point needs to be made about spatial planning and education, and that is we need to increase the number and improve the quality of graduates from all the built environment disciples, like town planning, land surveying, civil engineering, architecture, etc. For example, the Eastern Cape Province has no university offering a post graduate town planning degree. Tertiary institutions, working with government and others, need to look at establishing such courses. 

Built environment graduates need to understand this new spatial planning and clustering concept and methodology. Town planners and other professionals need to be trained in planning for education. In the interim, we need to find ways of more effectively utilising the existing built environment professionals we have. One option that could be considered for example is to locate these professionals in district offices and allow them to move between different local municipalities on a periodic and rotating basis.  Modern information and communication technology lends itself to allowing for a more ‘arms-length’ approach to much of this planning.

The Eastern Cape is renowned for having some good quality schools, universities and other educational facilities. We need to build on this reputation and look to the educational sector as one that can be used to both build the youth needed for future development and to also become an economic sector that helps to build the local economy.