The evidence your board is waiting for
Independent schools measure almost everything. Attainment, value added, attendance, admissions conversion, parent satisfaction, staff turnover, pupil wellbeing. A modern school leadership team has more data than any generation before it, and boards have learned to expect it. Bring a proposal without numbers and you’ll be sent away to find some.
Except in one area. The physical environment where all of that measured activity actually happens is, in most schools, a data-free zone. Ask a leadership team how their spaces perform, how they’re really used across a week, where they support learning and where they quietly work against it, and the honest answer is usually that nobody knows. The estate is the second largest item on the balance sheet after staff, and it’s the least examined.
In the last article we looked at why good estate projects stall, and one reason kept surfacing underneath the others: the evidence base was assumed rather than built. It’s worth taking that thread on its own, because two things have changed that make the gap harder to justify. The science has moved, and so has the scrutiny.
The science first.
For a long time, the link between physical environment and learning sat somewhere between common sense and wishful thinking, easy to believe, hard to defend in a board meeting. That’s no longer the position. A serious body of research in cognitive science now treats the environment not as a backdrop to learning but as part of the system that does the learning. The most accessible recent statement of it is Bodies of Learning, published in May by Guy Claxton and Emily Poel, which draws together the research on embodied cognition, the finding that thinking is not a sealed process happening inside a skull, but something that emerges from the interaction of mind, body and environment. Claxton is one of the most respected learning scientists in the country, and the book’s argument is blunt: schools have been designed around a picture of learning that the science no longer supports.
What the research points to, practically, is that pupils need their environment to do three different jobs.
It has to support deep, sustained focus, the conditions for concentration and absorption in demanding work. It has to support connection, because so much of learning, belonging and wellbeing is social. And it has to support recovery, the ability to reset between demands, which the research links directly to behaviour, attention and mental health. Most school estates were never designed with those three jobs in mind, and many spaces actively frustrate one job while serving another. The point is not that schools need new buildings. It’s that every school already has an estate doing these jobs well or badly, right now, largely unmeasured.
Then there’s the scrutiny.
After the year the sector has just had, boards are not funding conviction. The sceptical governor we described in the last article, the one whose unanswered doubt kills more projects than any budget shortfall, is not asking for vision. They’re asking for a baseline. How do our spaces perform today? What specifically is the problem? What did it change at schools that addressed it? Those are entirely reasonable questions, and the uncomfortable truth is that most proposals can’t answer them, not because the answers don’t exist, but because nobody went and got them.
When schools do get them, the conversation changes shape.
We’ve seen what happens when a school measures how its environment performs before asking for money rather than after spending it. The proposal stops being an opinion about tired spaces and becomes a diagnosis with a baseline attached. In one case, environment changes made on the back of that kind of evidence coincided with a pupil retention shift of more than 30 percentage points over two years, the sort of number that ends arguments in a board meeting rather than starting them. Not every project produces a result like that. But every project that gets funded in the current climate will need to show its working, and you cannot show your working without a starting point.
The schools best placed for the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones with the newest buildings. They’ll be the ones who understand the estate they already have, in the same detail they understand their academic results. The data exists to be gathered. The science now tells us what to look for.
So the question this time is a practical one. Your school can tell a prospective parent its value-added score to a decimal place. Could it tell an investment committee, with the same confidence, what its spaces are doing for its pupils?
Sources: Guy Claxton and Emily Poel, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education, Routledge, May 2026. Retention figure from a Noble + Eaton client school, measured across two academic years following evidence-led environment changes.
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