The relationship between school buildings and their pedagogies is complex. There is a consensus that the built environment through its structure and organisation can impact education, but it is often unclear or unknown how this happens in individual cases. Here we examine one design process, which led to the construction of a secondary school in…

This article takes as a starting point the career of Sir Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire (1945-1974), and traces his professional connections with educationists in Australia and New Zealand. In exploring the nature of global exchanges between educators, artists, architects and designers in the decades…

This article reports on the opening up of a new, rich seam of interdisciplinary research that brings together historians of education with historians of art and architecture to examine the meaning and incidence of "The Decorated School". It examines the origins of the idea of art as educator in the nineteenth century and discusses how…

Why look back to imagine the future? Given the almost universal consensus that higher level technology-enhanced learning should lead in the design of school buildings, what place is there for low-level (non-digital) technologies in education? What can we learn from revisiting schools that were at one time seen to be internationally pioneering in…

The Decorated School is an interdisciplinary research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The article situates current academic and wider community engagement concerning the purpose and significance of art as part of the school building and grounds in an historical context. It goes on to discuss emerging patterns of…

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the…

During the years following the Second World War, there were efforts in several European countries to grasp the opportunity to re-imagine "school" created through the need to rebuild on a mass scale. This article examines in detail an episode in the exchange of knowledge between English and Danish architects and educators during a period…

This article explores the European dimension of a collaborative approach to school design through the lives and relationships of a group of key individuals who in England set about transforming school in the post-war era. The philosophy and practice of this group of architects, educators, designers and policy makers, who regarded the school…

Prestolee School, at Kearsley, near Bolton in Lancashire, UK, was the site of an experiment in education between 1919 and 1952 under the leadership of head teacher, Edward Francis O'Neill (1890-1975). The school attracted much national and international attention over three decades owing to the unorthodox methods practised by O'Neill and the…

This article reports the interim findings of historical research, funded by the British Academy (2007), which is exploring the possibilities of prosopography (the study of biographies linked through a common purpose, philosophy or practice) in researching the relationship between educational thought and school design since World War Two. Through…