The building is teaching too

Stand at the front door of any post-primary school at twenty to nine and watch what arrives with the children.

The door itself, first: heavy, on a closer, and it bangs. Then the corridor, which was built for passing through and is being used for waiting in, because the rooms are locked until the bell. Four hundred bodies in a space designed for the width of two. Voices coming off hard surfaces with nowhere to go, so everyone raises theirs, so the sound climbs.

The bell, when it goes, is not a sound. It is an event.

By ten to eleven the canteen smell has reached the first-floor corridor. Outside the science room there is a fluorescent tube that has been flickering since before Easter and is on a list. At one o'clock the hall is the loudest room in Ireland, and somebody's English class is timetabled into it, because there is nowhere else and the hall was free.

And then there are the toilets, which some children will not use at all. Not once, in six hours. The dryers are the kind you hear two doors away. The locks are unreliable. Going in means being seen going in. So a young person drinks nothing from eight in the morning until she is back in the car, and by the time she gets there she has a headache nobody can account for.

None of this is on the timetable. All of it is teaching.

We kept the learning and left the building

Here is the thing I keep coming back to, and it is not a small irony.

Universal Design did not begin in education. It began in architecture — with the fairly radical idea that a building should be usable by the widest possible range of people without anyone having to ask for a special arrangement. Ramps that are just the way in, not the way round the back. Door handles that work with a full arm. Light you can stand. Signage a stranger can follow.

We borrowed that idea into education, translated it into curriculum and called it Universal Design for Learning, and it has done an enormous amount of good. But somewhere in the translation we kept the learning half and quietly dropped the building.

So we ask a teacher to design her lesson for everyone in the room, and we hand her a room she did not choose, in a building nobody designed for this, at a time of day somebody else decided. And then we describe what happens to the child in that room as the child's sensory needs — as though the noise were a property of her rather than of the corridor.

I say change the environment, not the child all the time. I have said it on this blog. What I notice is that when we say environment we almost always mean the classroom. The environment is also the stairwell at eleven, the dryer in the toilets, and the ten minutes at the locker.

Nobody chose this either

The buildings are the buildings. A great many Irish schools are operating out of fabric laid down for a different model of education entirely — rows, silence, a bell to move the rows — and the model has softened in tone since, but the walls have not moved.

The money that fixes fabric is not the money that pays teachers. Capital is a different budget, a different application, a different wait. No principal I have met chose the volume of the bell. No caretaker is sitting on the flickering tube out of spite; he has a list and a budget and the tube is item nine.

This is what I mean when I say the system, not the people. A whole building can be full of adults doing their best inside a design none of them authored.

What it costs

The young person pays first, and pays before any learning starts. She arrives at second period having already done an hour of work that appears on no record — filtering, bracing, deciding where to stand. When she does try to report it, the only words she has are it's too loud, and too loud reads as a preference rather than a barrier. We would not say that about a step at the front door.

The teacher can control her room. She cannot control the corridor, the timetable or the hall. She is asked to be sensory-aware and then given thirty-one second years in a room with one openable window and the afternoon sun. She notices the flicker too. She has mentioned it.

The parent gets the consequence and not the cause. At the kitchen table you are handed the result of a day you did not witness, and nobody can tell you it was the hand dryer, because nobody logged the hand dryer. So you go looking for a reason in your own child, which is where we always end up looking.

The household absorbs the rest of it — a sibling learning to be quiet in his own hall, an evening organised around recovery — and nothing in the building's design has ever had to account for that.

What a designed building looks like

Most of the useful list is free. That is the part I would ask any school to sit with.

Walk the building with the people who use it. Not a form filled in on a Tuesday afternoon in an empty corridor — a walk at twenty to nine, at the bell, at eleven, at one o'clock, with students in the group, including the ones who find it hardest. The New Brunswick school inclusion audit approach is useful here precisely because it asks about the setting rather than the child.

Do the free things first. Turn the bell down. Replace the dryers with paper towels. Prop the worst door. Stop timetabling a class into the hall at lunch. Replace the tube — genuinely, move it up the list, it costs less than the meeting about it.

Make one quiet place findable. Not a reward, not a sanction, not the chair outside the office, which already means something to everybody who walks past it. A place a young person can use before she needs it, without asking for permission in front of twenty-eight people.

Fix the toilets. Working locks, a dryer you can survive, somewhere to wash your hands that is not a performance. This is not a sensory accommodation. It is plumbing and dignity.

Make uniform and sensory allowances policy, not permission. The moment a softer shirt or ear defenders require a letter, we have turned access into a per-child transaction and put the cost of asking onto a thirteen-year-old.

Ask the building question once a term. One line, to everyone: which part of this building is hardest, and when? You will learn more from that than from most of the forms, and you will learn it before somebody's Tuesday falls apart.

Being honest about it

None of this replaces a speech and language therapist, an SNA, a special class place, or the report that is still on a waiting list. Blinds are not a service. A quieter bell does not stand in for staffing, and I would not want anyone to leave here thinking the fabric is the whole answer — it is not.

And some of it genuinely is not in the school's gift. You cannot re-plan a 1970s corridor out of the caretaking budget.

But the list above is mostly free, and mostly nobody is asking for it, and that is a different problem from not having the money.

She had not started struggling with the lesson. At twenty past nine she had not reached the lesson yet.

Nobody chose what the building teaches. It is teaching anyway.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.