This includes direct impacts on learning, such as young children's difficulties with reading if they live and learn in noisy environments, like beside major roads or under airport flight paths. There are also direct impacts on other important aspects of wellbeing, such as poor air quality that can slow learning. Finally, there are the less well-mapped, but nevertheless understood, downward spirals stemming from school design and maintenance.For instance,a badly maintained school drives down morale, feeding into higher staff turn-over and difficulties with student recruitment, which all contribute to behaviour and attendance problems, reducing opportunities to learn.

It is important to identify and rectify inadequate learning environments - repairing and rebuilding schools as necessary.Available research is quite clear on the dangers of poor quality educational settings, and demonstrates how action to address the issue can improve the educational experience and increase learning.

Yet educational professionals must recognise that a school environment is complex. Schools are systems in which the physical environment is just one of many interacting pedagogical, socio-cultural, curricular, motivational and socio-economic factors.

This complexity can result in a number of false leads. A major problem is when experts identify a variable that can harm learning, and then move on to believing that continuously improving that variable will also increase learning. Improving a poor environment is no doubt beneficial - but only within a certain range.

For example, the fact that poor air quality is associated with poor concentration and low attainment does not necessarily mean that improving air quality in a classroom which is already within 'normal' ranges will improve the concentration or attainment of pupils there. Similar logic applies to lighting. Increasing low light is helpful. Increasing lighting that is already robust should not be expected to benefit learning.

In fact, there is a great deal more evidence of impact on the benefits of improving insufficient environments but very limited evidence of positive results from tinkering with 'good enough' environments. The noted American academic Glen Earthman has compiled many reports on the impact of the school setting, and concluded in 2004 that inadequate school buildings cause health problems, lower student morale and contribute to poor student performance. However, he was not convinced that schools need necessarily be any more than “adequate”.

Before starting to change schooling environments, it is very important that professionals estimate the likely impact of any change by assessing the educational environment they are starting from. Essentially, if it isn't broke,why try to fix it? For practising teachers, the more interesting question is the relationship between physical surroundings and the sorts, or styles, of learning that may take place there. It has been claimed that as teaching and learning change, new space requirements are necessary.

However, research in the UK and USA has demonstrated repeatedly that the relationship between educational space and its use is complex. So while particular teaching and learning activities might be more easily conducted in certain spaces, the physical environment is rarely a decisive factor. Any given space can usually facilitate a variety of learning experiences. Given the same classroom, teachers with different values and beliefs about education often arrange and use their rooms quite differently.

That said, it is sensible to try to anticipate general tendencies in learning and teaching so that new school premises can broadly facilitate, rather than actively hinder, future activities. Considered in that light, current ideas about increasing collaborative ICT-based, educational activities are interesting. It has been suggested that such learning is aided by resourced, but quite informal spaces, where independent and group-based learning, as well as socialising, can take place. These sorts of multi-use spaces are now being included in some new school buildings in the UK (for example, Blyth Community College, Northumberland )

Furthermore, it would be wrong to think that changing the learning environment is pointless unless a direct connection can be proved between the environmental change and school exam results. Environmental psychologists point to the benefits of change for its own sake in overcoming thoughtless routine. As researchers Rivlin and Wolfe noted in 1985, “It is rare for a person to move a chair once it has been placed - even in one's own living room.”

Keeping that in mind, it can be beneficial to change one's environment. Such alterations can catalyse other changes. If the school community is properly involved, the process of redesigning and taking ownership of physical change can be empowering. This can spill over into empowerment in other areas, encouraging creativity and experimentation in curriculum, and raising motivation towards academic and social goals.

Perhaps the biggest problem for hopes of design impacting positively on the learning environment, however, is the way that money is often spent all at once in large amounts. In a short space of time, it is hard to know which aspects of the learning environment can be targeted most beneficially.

Beyond the necessity of meeting basic standards, there is not enough evidence to give clear guidance to policy makers on how to set priorities for funding, or to evaluate the relative value for money of different design initiatives. It might be better for schools to have the capital available over a number of years to make individual, bit by bit improvements, assessing their impact as they go along.

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Dr. Pam Woolner is a Research Associate in the Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University, UK. She investigates the foundational issues concerning the learning environment of schools, and also researches the design process as it is happening in British schools. Her work, bridging architecture, education and visual understanding, is unusual and she has been invited to provide expert input into projects and discussions at regional and national levels.