Bad school buildings will cause fights, teachers warn

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers warned that the Government's massive programme to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school in the country risks creating a huge discipline and health and safety headache for staff.

A worrying lack of common sense by construction firms employed by local authorities and Private Finance Initiative contractors meant elementary - and possibly dangerous - mistakes are being made.

Narrow corridors will become flashpoints for fights as hundreds of teenagers get in each other's way and jostle each other during lesson changeovers.

Windows that do not open properly will cause schools to become "greenhouses" in summer, leaving pupils severely dehydrated, uncomfortable, fractious and unwilling to knuckle down to learn anything, ATL health and safety experts Ann Nash and Philip Shackleton warned.

Failure to learn from past errors threatens the success of the £36billion Building Schools for the Future programme, ATL members warned the union's annual conference in Bournemouth. Islington and Greenwich are among the first authorities to benefit from the programme, which will see primary and secondary schools built with a mixture of public and private cash.

Ms Nash and Mr Shackleton said their experience as health and safety representatives in Bradford, where the council embarked on a city-wide school rebuilding programme in 2000, provides a cautionary tale.

All defects in the city's rebuilt schools were supposed to have been dealt with by 2005 but two years later, many problems still remain, they said.

Ms Nash said although government guidelines laid down minimum standards - for example of the amount of space per pupil each classroom should have - private firms were allowed to build schools the same way they would office blocks.

What works for adults is often inappropriate and dangerous for children, she said.

"You get things like staircases and corridors being too narrow for movement in both directions," Ms Nash said. "They are not building schools as schools, they are building buildings which they think can be used as schools.

"You don't have to worry about corridors in office blocks causing discipline problems as they do in schools."

Ms Nash said ventilation is a "huge problem" in schools because architects and buildingfirms fail to understand that children find it far more difficult to work quietly if they are too hot or cold.

Mr Shackleton said the ATL needed to conduct research to find out if new school buildings were "fit for purpose".

Ms Nash said that even basic facilities, such as lavatory blocks, are often built without thought that hundreds of children and staff will use them at the same time. She knew of teachers who avoided drinking water during the day so they do not have to visit the lavatory.

Constructors also often fail to build enough storage space so corridors fill up with bookshelves and pupils' bags, creating tripping hazards.