The innovative high school that should be normal

It is remarkable, pioneering, innovative, unusual – and it shouldn't be. That is the best conclusion to draw from the new 'state of the art' high school which has been built in Currie, because in fact it actually isn't state of the art and the innovative methods for its design and creation have been used for years.

In fact more than that, its whole funding methodology and its entire ethos and development are almost exactly a translation of what Common Weal (in partnership with other organisations and professionals) has been campaigning for for seven years now. This kind of school is only innovative in Scotland because we usually do it badly.

Currie Community High School is the school you would want to send your kids to. It is the school you would want to learn in. And it is a model for how to deliver this kind of infrastructure, a model it has been painfully slow to get government to accept and which has been met with disinterest and indeed resistance.

What is different about this project begins from its funding model. Part of the Learning Estate Investment Programme (Leip) initiative, it is built in roughly the traditional model where the local authority running the school builds, owns and pays for it.

The focus was then on design and specification. It is easier to be drawn to the specification than the design process – that it has been built to passive standards so is almost energy neutral (and is warm and draft-free and has a healthy internal atmosphere), that it has great circulation and meeting space, impressive facilities, good light which has made the most of the views...

But it is a mistake not to see that this is, in large part, a result of the design process. Unlike almost everything else that is built in Scotland, this project was co-designed. That means the pupils, teachers and community were closely involved in the design process and helped to shape it.

There are countless benefits that come from this. The most obvious is that it leads to facilities better suited to the real needs of those they serve and less designed in the interests of financiers. But there are all kinds of benefits which are less tangible but every bit as important, like the strong sense of community it has engendered and the way the community (both the learning community and the surrounding population) feel ownership.

Nothing protects a building in the long term better than real community buy-in. If a community is proud of a building and if it serves them well, they will respect it and look after it. This mutual respect has countless spin-offs – even the pupils are likely to learn better since they feel this is 'their' school and not just a school they are sent to.

And in all this it is important to recognise that it is inconceivable that any of this would happen under the current PFI-variant that Scotland uses to build almost everything else. You can only do all of the above if you are building for the long term and if you are building with the intention of getting the maximum value out of what you are building.

When buildings are built with private finance the goal is not to get the maximum value from what is built but to extractthe maximum possible value during the building and operation period. This is a community facility. It's infrastructure is not locked behind a paywall when the school day ends. It is open at night for multiple uses. It is what a community school should be.

Because it is publicly funded. Because it is designed in the public interest, not the financiers' interest. Because it is designed for long-term use.

Common Weal was a founder member of the Scotland Against Public Private Partnership coalition. It has been trying to highlight that the Scottish Futures Trust (which acts as a gatekeeper for most infrastructure development in Scotland) is a financier-driven body which is best understood as 'slightly constrained PFI'. It is ideologically committed to private finance in public building.

We have been calling for it to be replaced with a Scottish National Infrastructure Company as a centre of excellence for great public infrastructure design which would build everything – from a school to a bridge – using this kind of design process, driven by the needs of users and not financiers and with funding packages supported by the Scottish National Investment Bank and the Public Sector Loans Board.

This package of measures was passed by the SNP as party policy in 2017. It has cross-party support including from the Tories. And it has been shown not only to work but to work better. And yet still it meets with resistance from the parts of government which have a strong relationship with Scotland's financial sector.

Currie Community Council should not be innovative, it should be normal. The simple question for politicians is why they are knowingly and intentionally building sub-par schools or hospitals under any circumstances.

You can find more info here.