ABSTRACT
The decade from the late 1960s to the late 1970s was a watershed for school design in Australia. The influential Plowden Report was tabled in the United Kingdom in 1967 (Plowden 1967), precipitating major changes to educational procedure and learning spaces in that country. This had an immediate impact on educational leaders in Australia, some of whom travelled so they could observe international changes in situ. A. W. (Alby) Jones, a senior education bureaucrat in South Australia in the period and Director General of Education in the state from 1970 to 1977, as well as a member of the Australian Schools Commission from its inauguration in 1972, was particularly influential. Jones was convinced that the hierarchical and authoritarian aspects of state schooling had to be reformed and that rigid school spaces and timetabling needed to be broken down if students and teachers were to be given greater input into the content and form of education (Jones 1977). Reflecting a global trend, a growing number of educational leaders and school designers in Australia in the period shared Jones’s view that the conventional organisation of schools around individual, enclosed classroom units was outmoded and educationally counterproductive. Consequently, various versions of the open classroom idea flourished in the period as each state and territory adopted some version of it, rethinking the design of classrooms and schools, while loosening grade-level divisions and encouraging collaborative teaching and problem-based learning. This chapter examines that moment of educational and architectural transformation, and it considers how educational and architectural objectives coalesced into a distinctive new type of school that, broadly speaking, embraced open planning and encouraged spatial fluidity.
