Children experience a key part of their childhood in their primary school and it forms one of their principal social spaces (Dudek 2000). The school site, its buildings and grounds, provides the infrastructure which supports learning and development. ‘School buildings should inspire learning. They should nurture every pupil and member of staff. They should be a source of pride and a resource for the community’ (Ministerial introduction to the Building Schools for the Future consultation, DfES 2003a). Nurturing pupils means examining the ways in which school buildings contribute to, or become a barrier to, accessing the curriculum and meeting the core principles of the Every Child Matters agenda (DfES 2004). The design, disposition and use of school buildings transmit educational and social values (Alexander 2001: 176); so does the value placed by society on the quality and appropriateness of the spaces it provides for children’s learning, inside and outside of school. To understand the ways in which school buildings impact on children and teachers it is necessary to consider a number of key features of the built environment: the school’s location; its size; the ways in which classrooms are lit, ventilated, heated and exposed to different types of noise. The focus of this chapter is the impact of the interconnected spaces of the English

primary school as an environment for living and learning. To address this question we begin by considering the primary school as a building and the ways in which various social changes and political directives have impacted on its development. The evidence base examining the effects of noise, ventilation, heating and lighting in schools is then considered. For each environmental variable we consider relevant outcome measures. These outcome measures include pupil educational attainment and pupil and teacher well-being and health. The limitations of the current data are discussed. The concluding section considers the factors that limit the ‘future proofing’ of schools and the impact of schools on environmental sustainability.