Over the next 15 years, 3,500 UK schools will be rebuilt or refurbished in a seventy billion pound (110 billion euro) programme called Building Schools for the Future (BSF). The problem, as Joe Heapy explained to a meeting last week of the Dott 07 Explorers Club, is that “BSF is so huge, that most people within it are working to the limits of their experience”. Besides, it’s by no means clear that throwing money at buildings will make a vast difference. As The Economist comments this week, a crumbling edifice improves results, but as long as classrooms are decent—not too dark, damp, noisy, airless, hot or cold—further frills seem to make little difference. The paper quotes Elaine Hall, a Newcastle University education researcher who has studied past building programmes: “While improvements to schools where the buildings fell below an acceptable standard did have a significant impact upon health, student morale and student performance, the same could not be said once an adequate standard of provision was reached”. Hall’s research seems to confirm my own unkindly-received assertion (on page 147-148 of In The Bubble) that “there’s no need to purpose build huge numbers of schools and colleges”. The more pressing challenge, surely, is to confront the dimishing spaces of childhood. Hence our search, in Dott 07, for a design challenge to do with “school out of school”.