Consulting students about their school experience is widely acknowledged as a key theme in school improvement and central to the vision and success of the English government's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. This project was initiated by secondary headteachers in Thanet with support from their local authority. It sought to inform both their vision for secondary education and their response to the BSF initiative.

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Working together with the HCD Student Partnership a process of enquiry was designed to actively involve 100 students from 12 secondary schools in collecting and presenting data which engaged with their views about their learning environments inside and out of school (Frost and Holden, 2007). Two full-day workshops were held to facilitate this with time in between for students to take photographs of places where they like to learn and socialise as well as those areas they would like to change in school.

The first workshop introduced students to educational design while the second asked them to reflect on their own experiences of formal and informal learning environments, both inside and out of school, through a range of interactive tasks. During the second day's workshop the students were asked to make large posters using the photographs they had taken in their school. A 'gallery walk' then took place where the groups of students circulated around the posters and stuck written notes of their observations about the contents onto each others' work. These comments provided ideas for solutions to problems, encouragement and in some cases sympathy! Additional activities then took place to solicit further views about preferred informal and formal learning environments.

The data collected from the two workshops shows that students engage in a wide range of activities and value places that are spacious, bright, modern, adequately resourced and well-maintained.

Outside of school their close relationships and personal and public spaces provide many of the conditions conducive to learning.

Inside of school the students in this sample feel they experience in general more inspiration and success through arts based subjects while the sciences are seen as more challenging. Some students recognise a link between positive learning environments and positive behaviour.

Such findings are not unusual or unexpected. What is significant for this group of schools is that these outcomes have prompted further school-based research and teacher-led development work with students, the outcomes of which will be available in 2008.

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