Glass Palaces = Better Educational Environments

Whoever designed the school I've just started working at has obviously been properly briefed in the full range of stereotypical judgments it is possible to make on the young people who go there. Anyone's first impression on entering is that it bears a startling resemblance to Alcatraz. The key function of the building appears to be the lockdown. And then you enter the classroom.

The wall decoration of choice in my new classroom is the unpainted breeze block. Initially I'd thought, perhaps foolishly, that this was some postmodern nuance of architectural philosophy. "Ah. Well noted, Beadle. We keep the walls functional as an inverse correlative of the school's approach to learning and, indeed, to teaching – should it exist. The hue of the walls serves to minimise visual noise, and the exquisite sparseness means children can project their thoughts, hopes and aspirations on to the blank, grey canvas of the brick."

No such cobblers, I'm afraid. The walls aren't painted because, if they were, the bricks would not be able to breathe and the building would fall down. Given that it houses 1,200 students and there's quite a lot of glass, this would be considered a bad thing.

Speaking of glass, not since my days as a Penge window cleaner's assistant have I seen quite so much of it. The school is, for a limited period only, at the bottom of the league tables, and this, of course, inevitably affects admissions. Consequently, there are several boys and girls in attendance to whom Mr Naughty is not a stranger. Last year, so I am told, this fatal combination of naughty boy and glass palace combined, in startling symbiosis, with the presence of small stones in the bits where trees are planted, to produce an array of aural shivering effects and a glazing bill in the region of £13,000 a month.

The building is shaped like a cheese wedge, meaning that classrooms at the front of it have sloping ceilings, in the region of over 30 feet (10m) high on the righthand side, eight feet (3m) high on the left. Personally, this leads me to feel I'm teaching in an educational version of the crooked house amusements one might find in a post-communist, Hungarian fairground, though the kids tend not to notice. What they do notice, though, is that the rooms are unbearably hot in the summer, and that the only windows available for opening are narrow-eyed fellows whose bottoms are about 29 feet up in the air.

Teachers responding to a class's complaints of stuffiness must engage in a ridiculous ballet in which, with the aid of the school's single 30-foot long pole, they attempt to co-ordinate their hand movements to unhook the window latch at a distance of what must feel to them like several miles. So extreme is this distance, that the merest half-tremor of the little finger can cause the hook to miss the latch by an a cutely embarrassing distance. Whole double lessons are wasted as male students collapse into torrents of uncontrollable hysterics while gamine, female teachers attempt vainly to open a window. "Face it, miss," the boys chortle joyously and rhythmically, "you ain't got the control to get the pole in the hole."

When the window is finally opened, after several lessons marked by much hilarity and little learning, no one notices the breeze, of course; it's 30 feet up! A whisper across the foothills of heaven. Of no use at all to the earthbound.

The second floor, however, is so well acquainted with the heavens it tempts students to pay an early visit to them. The main corridor is a balcony many miles above the ground, with only a railing separating students and teachers from a meeting with their maker. I have held informal chats with colleagues on that balcony, my back glued with vertiginous fear to the wall furthest away from "touching the void". "What do you think of so and so's attainment so far this year?"

"I don't know. I don't care about education. I'm going to fall. Fear the railing! Fear the railing!"

This would be bad enough were it not for the existence of the viewing platform. At one point the balcony sweeps out, in a grand arc, supported by nothing, leaving the feebler student or teacher who stands on it feeling exactly as safe and secure as if they were teetering at the edge of a promontory overlooking a Norwegian fjord, supported only by a thin elastic band.

Thankfully the students seem to recognise the need to behave appropriately on the top floor. And, in all honesty, this particular glass palace is a far better educational environment than, for instance, the school I worked in where there were so few tiles in the roof that a man (whom the kids had wittily named Rufus) had set up home there; or the school in which the toilets resembled the seventh circle of hell so accurately that you were given a special award for risking the hem of your trouser in the bosom of the sit-downs. (And at least no one thought it would be a sensible idea to put a trading floor in the atrium!)

So, yes, it is better to work in a glass palace than a decaying wreck. The students seem to feel that the building respects them, and behaviour and learning are both showing a marked upturn. It wasn't like this last year, though, and the building was exactly the same. What reason, then, for the improvements? What reason for the fact that the glazing bill hasn't even reached £100 this month?

The reason is that a school is the human beings in it, not the fabric that surrounds them. The school in which I work is on a steep upward trajectory, and it is on this trajectory because the human beings in it, staff and students, are forcing it. It's all very well architects deciding to experiment on children with some of their more outré creative ideas, but if a school isn't managed well, by exceptional people, it will fail, be it palace or dungeon.