We’re delighted that Jonathan has guest edited this quarter’s edition of Planning Learning Spaces – the specialist journal on school building design for architects, designers and school leaders.

The edition includes schools from around the world as well as our own RIBA National Award-winning Edith Neville Primary School. Jonathan’s editorial highlights the importance of listening and ensuring that our profession’s design of school environments is founded on listening to the specific communities that we design for. He writes;

“We were once asked by the funding-lead for one of the UK’s most prominent educational charities, at the beginning of a commission, ‘are you a listening architect’. The question seemed perverse to us at the time, but the collaborative design relationship that followed revealed how many of the architects they had worked with prior to us, some of whom are the leading architects of the day, were not.

The idea of listening is core to this edition of Planning Learning Spaces. Listening to learners, listening to educators, and successfully processing the experiences of building users and local communities into new designs that support improvements to learning. The work in this edition demonstrates that the process of design, as with education itself, is in continual evolution and no single school model fits all.”

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