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Walker, A, Greenwood, D and Johansen, E (2010) User engagement and quality in the design of UK schools. In: Egbu, C (Ed.), Proceedings 26th Annual ARCOM Conference, 6-8 September 2010, Leeds, UK. Association of Researchers in Construction Management, Vol. 1, 3–12.
- Type: Conference Proceedings
- Keywords: building schools for the future; design process; design quality indicator; user engagement
- ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-9552390-4-5
- URL: http://www.arcom.ac.uk/-docs/proceedings/ar2010-0003-0012_Walker_Greenwood_and_Johansen.pdf
- Abstract:
For over fifty years, dating back to the Simon report (1944), commentators on the UK construction industry have been lamenting the design-construct divorce and advocating earlier contractor involvement to produce, inter alia, better quality buildings. Since 2003 a substantial part of the addition to the value of UK new building stock has been in the form of schools. Most have been delivered through the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme and the majority of projects within BSF have been procured under a modified PFI (PPP) system. This of course means that early contractor involvement is a ‘given’. Despite this, in 2006 a CABE report on new schools was still critical of their quality. The paper explores whether other factors – in particular the degree and timing of user-engagement – have had an influence on the quality of the end product, and presents a method for testing this.