Designing school Buildings as Development Hubs for Learning
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The purpose of the project is to identify key design requirements for schools to enable them to become learning and development hubs for communities. |
This research will be conducted through school case studies in Ghana and South Africa. The key successful design and planning characteristics which have led to good child learning outcomes will be determined through this study. Examples of successful learning environments include for example after-school libraries and primary health care centres.
The product of this research will be country-specific local school design guides, a comparative report on school design, and inter-disciplinary academic papers related to the project findings.
Lead researcher: Nwola Uduku, o.uduku@eca.ac.uk
Edinburgh College of Art.
Researchers: Mathramuthu Pillay, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; George Oduro, University of Cape Coast; Jeremy Gibberd, CSIR, Pretoria; George Intsiful, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
Preliminary findings
A workshop involving a sample of 240 head teachers from 12 districts in Ghana has revealed that the most pressing issues in relation to a quality education are the commitment, attendance and time-on-task of teachers.
From research conducted in South Africa and Ghana in three sample schools in each country we were able to ascertain that the pre-school feeding programmes contributed positively to education quality by increasing student retention in the early years of primary education. However the design of facilities for meal preparation and meal consumption for the children was inadequate or at times non existent.
Sanitation facilities (WCs, hand washing, and access to drinking water) for students in the primary schools surveyed were also inadequate, and often overlooked or taken as being a perennial issue by staff, - and therefore not properly addressed. In urban and semi urban areas often access to water; pipeborne or by borehole was not the problem. The main problem was the poor design of toilets, wash hand basins, and standpipes, to withstand the use of large numbers of school children. The result was that there was the increase risk of infection and disease, which would ultimately affect educational outcomes amongst children who were already weakened by health problems such as aids or high levels of malaria. The absentee levels due to sickness amongst these groups was already noted as being considerably high.
The South African schools survey established that the government-supported school farms project had been successful in producing food for school feeding programmes, and also a means of employment and nutrition for poorer families who were employed to work on the farms. This again in turn improved the education quality of poorer children who had access to free school meals, and their parents who had small remunerations for their work on the farms either in kind via surplus food given to the workers or occasionally as cash through food sold by the school.
