Survey on Students School Spaces (S3S) is a tool that aims to redesign and re-rehabilitate school spaces through an inclusive process, by integrating student feedback in the co-design of learning environments (Coelho et al., 2022). Acknowledging the need to align school and pedagogy, S3S was developed for the alignment between student use and appropriation and their school spaces.
This is achieved by a bipartite procedure of an initial students’ online survey and a subsequent focus group in the form of an on-site walkthrough of students within the mentioned spaces (S3S’s tutorials and materials: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/cored/tools/school-spaces). The survey reaches a more extensive array of students who use the school premises, and the walkthrough can detail more specific circumstances of student’s occupation of these spaces. The tool can, ultimately, provide information and ideas on students’ feelings, experience and activities that can feedforward physical changes in the school, by means of a bottom-up and participatory design process.
S3S was implemented in three ssettings – Eugénio de Castro School and Rainha Santa Isabel School in Portugal, and Ponteland High School in the UK, three schools with very different conditions, construction dates and building types. In Portugal, the intention was to co-design adaptations to premises (built in 1972 and 1999) that were recognised to have limitations due to both age and design. In some contrast, the UK school was newly constructed and S3S was chosen by senior leadership as a means to conduct a student-focused post occupancy evaluation.
Overall, the use of S3S in these schools proved that it is user-friend and flexible and can be adjusted to each school’s needs and expectations. Even though it was largely motivated by the school leaders, it can be mediated by teachers and/or students, according to the schools’ communities and their dynamics. As we will show, it can consider small or large-scale rehabilitations, either with moveable or more permanent physical improvements.
We will also consider how the opportunity provided to students by S3S can be limited by constraints, evident in the case studies, including the control by teachers of the process and delays at the municipal level in implementing refurbishments. Yet, set against these limitations, we report actual changes that have occurred in these schools, or that are anticipated in the future, validating the tool as an enabler of co-redesign, perhaps in seemingly minor ways, and a catalyst for a more profound sense of ownership and empowerment of students.
