Jeff Phillips
Team Leader, Research & Development
Department of Education, Perth WA

Greetings all from Perth, Western Australia,

Prakash mentioned that he has been working with us on a new school where we started not with an Ed Spec, but a couple of pages of generic goals. This is a fairly common process used by the Department of Education in Western Australia and has come about from a belief that there is no “one-size-fits-all” architectural solution to educational facilities provision.

The goals set down while pretty generic, are in fact up for debate and it is this process, conducting an educational debate with the school community that engages architect, educator, parent and student in defining their signature (per Bruce Jilk) It’s a long process, we resource it well but there are often some nervous moments, particularly for parents and teachers challenged to leave their comfort zones. To me that is what the Ed Specs represent, someone’s comfort zone, particularly when you are about to spend $25M of taxpayers money on a new school.

Maybe its Western Australia’s geography and history that supports the risk of leaving a comfort zone to explore new frontiers. I think there are some good navigation tools available now, and asking people for directions rather than giving them map certainly makes the journey (process) an important part of the destination (solution) Christopher Columbus found his way to the New World by Dead Reckoning (knowing where you’ve come from) so I think case studies are essential home ports. However instead of the case study focusing on the architecture of the last school built, why not focus on the process, the questions, topics, agreements and disagreements that lead to the school’s design and see whether these can be tested again.

Many schools in Western Australia are quite individual yet they all meet the Ed Specs. The reason for their individuality can be attributed to the different points we were at in the educational debate when it was closed off and the documentation started. It is not because we have changed the Ed Specs to increase or add more area from the last school built and therefore have a new model for future schools.

Committed sardines are never comfortable, are they Prakash?

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