Typically, it is engineers that have examined the buildings and assessed their condition, but school students and engineers may have different ideas about what is important and how they are affected by it.
Arnt Ove Hopland
Good schools, better students
School buildings throughout Norway are in a state of disrepair. Even in the most wealthy municipalities, local politicians put off prioritising maintenance. ‘How does this affect the learning environment,' asks researcher Arnt Ove Hopland.
‘People who like their jobs work hard. That’s the way it is in the workplace and it’s not surprising, therefore, that students’ efforts can also be negatively influenced by miserable surroundings in schools,’ says postdoctoral fellow Arnt Ove Hopland of the Department of Finance and Management Science at NHH.
He has published several scientific articles in the past few years in which he examines the maintenance situation for municipal buildings.
Satisfied with school
In several studies, he has turned his attention to school buildings in order to investigate whether their state of disrepair has consequences for the students’ work and learning. Since students are regularly tested in different ways, he can compare their results with their views on the schools they attend. They have answered a questionnaire (The Student Survey, developed by the Directorate for Education and Training), which provides answers to how the students themselves regard their social and physical learning environment.
‘Typically, it is engineers that have examined the buildings and assessed their condition, but school students and engineers may have different ideas about what is important and how they are affected by it,’ says Hopland.
In one of the studies, he checked the connection between the learning environment and the students’ performance. In another, he looked at how student satisfaction correlates with effort at school and at home (see the references at the end of the article).
Work harder in class
If you are satisfied at work, there is no doubt that you work harder.
This is also the case for school students. If the students are happy with the school building itself – that the changing rooms, showers and toilets look reasonably good and that the paint and wallpaper isn’t hanging off the walls – it does something to their motivation.
‘It’s almost impossible to use this kind of data to analyse marginal causal effects, but the results clearly indicate that students who are satisfied with their school work better. Some differentiate between these things, suggesting that high satisfaction and working hard are in opposition to each other. Students who are satisfied do good work. We thus see that the standard of the buildings correlates with the students’ efforts in the classroom.’
Parents decide at home
The effect only applies to what happens at school, not to homework.
Hopland believes that politicians should also take note of this.
‘It suggests that satisfaction helps to stimulate work effort at school, while it is largely the parents who decide how much time and effort is spent on homework in the home. We are now starting to see some indications that the buildings have an effect on effort.’
Hopland thinks it would be interesting to view this from a broader perspective – for example, whether municipalities that have well-maintained buildings provide better services.
One delay after another
‘If it is correct that the provision of services is not affected in any way by the condition of buildings, then it is possible to say that maintaining them in good condition is not all that important. The municipality can build a building, preferably as cheaply as possible, and use it until it is no longer fit for its purpose before building a new one.’
‘As the situation for schools appears to be today?’
‘That’s part of what we are seeing in practice. Buildings are used until they no longer function and are in breach of technical regulations.’
Financial muscle is of course important. If you have a lot of money, you will generally have a better chance of fixing things. But this is very dependent on political muscle and how fragmented the municipal councils are.
Arnt Ove Hopland
‘Why do municipalities constantly postpone maintenance of the buildings?’
‘This can largely be explained by two factors. Financial muscle is of course important. If you have a lot of money, you will generally have a better chance of fixing things. But this is very dependent on political muscle and how fragmented the municipal councils are. If they have many parties of equal size that have to negotiate about all budget items, municipal buildings will be given low priority.
They will then constantly put things off.’
Municipalities that borrow funds
However, municipalities with big dominant parties and a stable majority are more capable of long-term prioritisation.
‘You can compare it with municipal borrowing: A high degree of political fragmentation causes municipalities to borrow more. They are unable to keep their expenditure down.’
‘Do mergers of municipalities put maintenance of schools at risk, since local politics will become even more fragmented?’
‘If municipalities are merged, this will lead to more divergent interests and short-term policies, but the Government seems to be willing to invest a lot of money to ensure a smooth transition, so that the municipalities can largely be governed as before. My fear is that the Government will sweeten the pill to such an extent that the reform won't result in much savings at all, at least not in the short-term.’
Optimal course
Hopland has one particular hobby horse that he does not believe is taken into consideration by the engineers who analyse and quantify the maintenance backlog for municipal buildings. It relates to the ‘optimal course’ for maintenance.
‘They do not take into account that a building has a limited useful life, choosing instead to base their calculations on the building remaining as ‘good as new’ forever more. However, it is often not the technical condition of the building that results in it being replaced, but changes in functionality and environmental requirements, for example. This means that it is meaningless to maintain the buildings to such an extent that they are as good as new throughout their life cycle.’
References:
Learning environment and student effort written by postdoctoral fellow Arnt Ove Hopland of the Department of Finance and Management Science, NHH and Ole Henning Nyhus, researcher at the Department of Economics, NTNU. The study is published in the International Journal of Educational Management.
They have also written Does student satisfaction with school facilities affect exam results?: An empirical investigation. It was published in the journal Facilities.
Hopland and Sturla Kvamsdal at SNF have published the article Optimal maintenance scheduling for local public purpose buildings in the journal Property Management.
Hopland is also the author of the article Schools and public buildings in decay: the role of political fragmentation. It was published in the journal Economics of Governance. It was a collaboration with Lars-Erik Borge, professor at the Department of Economics, NTNU.
Hopland has recently published a study together with Sturla F Kvamsdal, a researcher at the Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration AS (SNF), in which they apply optimisation techniques to examine how much and when a building should undergo maintenance. This work will also result in further publications in the time ahead.
Refurbishing the house
‘If buildings are left to decay, the decay will accelerate over time. The same is true in the private sector. It is easier and cheaper to paint your house one year than to have to replace the weatherboarding a few years later.’
Those responsible for maintenance in the municipalities must find the ‘optimal course of decay’. In very simplified terms, this means: keep the building above an acceptable level throughout its entire period of use, but let it decay towards this level when the building nears the end of its useful life, so that you do not spend more on maintenance than necessary.
‘It is obvious that a building that is better than it needs to be on the day it is demolished is money wasted,’ says Hopland.