Assessing the Value of Higher Education Teaching Space

The way buildings are designed has a significant impact on their cost, durability and appearance; and also on their value to the people who use them. 

Quantifying Value to Higher Education Users is the latest research project undertaken by the research group within Constructing Excellence Bristol Club and Constructing Excellence South West.  The project aims to define the value of design for three groups of stakeholders:

- students
- academic staff
- construction industry professionals

The findings will enable construction professionals to assist HE clients in achieving their business objectives while also increasing user satisfaction.

Many factors can impact upon a student’s satisfaction within an education environment. Many of these, including teaching quality, transport links, cost of living etc., are unconnected with the quality of the buildings themselves. Thus, to eliminate external variables, the research focused on buildings at a single university. The selected site was Frenchay Campus at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Frenchay is a large campus north of Bristol which has experienced considerable growth in recent years. This made possible the identification of four buildings, to be used as the test bed for the research, which differ significantly in terms of age, materials and finishes, architectural style and maintenance needs. The findings, which are based on 497 responses to an online questionnaire, can be summarized as follows:

Students:
- rate highly the provision of ad-hoc social space.
- enjoy their time irrespective of the quality of the building.

Academic staff:
- feel that consideration should be given to their need for social space.
- are adversely affected by poor equipment, management and quality of buildings.

Professionals:
- share similar views with students and staff in terms of which are the good quality buildings.
- are sometimes are too enthusiastic about innovative design.

Conclusions:
- All groups consider good quality buildings to be a credit to the University.
- The overall outcome seems particularly relevant to the current economic climate. It appears that students and staff can be fully satisfied without the need to commission expensive ‘wow-factor’ buildings.
- In turn, this would reduce capital and running costs.
- Using some of that saving on improved equipment and better management of the buildings could potentially yield much greater satisfaction for both staff and students.

Does the outcome advocate designing ‘dull-factor’ buildings?  Definitely not!  It advocates designing ‘user-focused’ buildings.

The research was carried out between 2006 and 2009 at the University of the West of England.

Constructing Excellence Bristol Club would like to express their gratitude to the University as well as to all students and university staff who participated in the project.

The participants in the research project were:
John Rich, Chair, Stubbs Rich Architects - Richard Kochanski, Carillion - Mark Claridge, Davis Langdon - Steve Symonds, Kier - Nick Howkins, Northcroft - Ian Dacre, Rider Levett Bucknall - David Baker-Falkner, Turner & Townsend - Karsan Vaghani, University of Bristol - Martyn Jones, University of the West of England - Christos Vidalakis, University of the West of England - Gareth Turner, Willmott Dixon

The findings are the copyright of Constructing Excellence Bristol Club, 2010.
For further information, click here please to view the Constructing Excellence Bristol Club website.