According to Harvard School of Public Health, the average student spends over 15,000 hours at school by the time they graduate high school. That’s secondary only to the amount of time they spend at home, and makes it paramount to design school buildings that support the physical and mental health of students, teachers and staff. We asked Sally Brincat, an architect with over 20 years of experience, as well as ThomsonAdsett’s Victoria Education Sector Lead, how that fundamental factor influences her own practice.

“What we apply to our projects is this idea of creating an environment where the students can feel safe, both physically and emotionally. And the connection to nature is fundamental to all of that,” says Sally. Her design approach is defined by the belief that visual and physical access to nature has a positive impact on learning outcomes.

“This can take the form of really great landscapes, ensuring that students have good views in and out of classrooms,” she elaborates. “Equally, it’s important that there is fresh air and sunlight, and that the students can see nature progress - that they can experience the seasons change, they can see the wind and rain. So long as they're protected from the elements, of course.”

Her views are anchored in real-life student-feedback. ThomsonAdsett has been participating in an Australian Research Centre’s Linkage Project which looks at how students can thrive in vertical schools. What really stood out to Sally was the fact that two kinds of spaces emerged as the most popular ones: break-out and green spaces – both when it comes to outdoor areas, and the visual connection with the outdoors in environments like classrooms.

“We need to make sure that we are creating spaces where the students can get outside or see outside. That's probably the trick to making vertical schools successful,” Sally adds, pointing to Botanic High School in Adelaide as a great example in that space.

She has recently led a large joint venture team on five primary and two secondary schools across mainstream and inclusion streams for the Victorian School Building Authority (VSBA). An important part of the project was to really bring the landscape into the immediate surrounds of the building. “Those schools have these fantastic window seats, and the students can sit in the window and they've actually got landscape right up with them,” she explains.

This resolve to integrate school buildings within the surrounding landscape is a pivotal part of ThomsonAdsett’s practice. “We spend a lot of time and effort working with our landscape teams to make sure that the buildings are really embedded in the country, and shift away from man-made elements that make up the external landscape” she adds. “We're also really starting to engage the schools that we work with, with their First Nations Elders – custodians of the land that they're on – to help them embed that in their education, in the narrative that the kids will be getting in the classroom.”

Sally highlights the essential role First Nations People must play in this process. “We have become so disconnected from nature in our day-to-day lives. And we see the effects of that every day. Climate change is actually a symptom of how disconnected as a society we've become from nature. By starting to embed that fully into schools, we can really start to shift the needle back to where it needs to be. We need to be instilling in children from a very young age that they can be, and should be, one with nature,” she starts.

”And there's a lot to learn from First Nations people in that regard as well. They've been here, looking after the country for thousands of years, and they were doing a fantastic job until us colonials came along and started changing the narrative. Biophilic design really gets us back to basics.” Sally adds that there is also an essential extension into outdoor learning happening at the moment. “I think that it will fundamentally change the way that our youngest students grow up and how they view what we're doing to the planet,” she says passionately.

“And I think that all of that is really going to have benefits,” she sums up. “One of the things about designing schools is that you're designing spaces that are going to educate thousands of students over the next dozens of years. And that's a really good way to think about what we do. It has a lasting impact. It's not a short term thing.”

If you’d like to hear about other examples of modern school design, listen to the full podcast episode here.