This thesis investigates the educational potential of practising spatial design within primary and secondary schools in England. Four gaps in the literature were identified: the possibilities of children engaging pro-actively in the relationship between architecture and education; a theoretical and empirical understanding of ‘negotiation’ as a model of transformative participation; accounts of participatory design that interrogate and make visible the messy and complex; and qualitative analytic approaches that are relational and spatial.

The thesis first develops a relational understanding of the practice of spatial design as inescapably contingent and political, able to operate in both dominant and nondominant modes, each with different educational purposes and potentials. Second, it investigates how the mode of spatial design is operationalised through exploring empirically how different negotiations manifest and unfold during its practice, including the effects of the methods and methodology used. The empirical research drew on a Design Anthropological approach, supported by elements of Critical Art Practice, and was undertaken through the researcher’s active role in three spatial design projects, each using various design methods: explorative walks, examining precedent projects, drawing, and physical modelling. Two took place in English primary schools and one in an English secondary.

In this study, material, care, and time are identified as key elements of method and approach that directly affect the mode of participation operationalised within spatial design practices. The study also demonstrates how schools continually produce and are produced-by negotiations between the human, material, policy, regulatory, and financial threads that comprise them; how these negotiations manifest and unfold during design and inhabitation through uses of material, care, and time; and how the particular qualities of materials, care, and time used are thus central to the nature of negotiations and by-extension practices of design and inhabitation.

The spatial analytic approach taken shows architects and educationalists the importance of attending to what happens during spatial design, not simply its methods and outcomes, and offers a means to do so. Architects and designers will realise through this study that reflexive, attentional participation is essential to developing relational understandings of inhabitation within schools, and that serious consideration of material-, care-, and time-use is fundamental to this. The study demonstrates to educationalists and policy makers the negotiated, contingent nature of architecture and education’s relationship and thus the value of practising spatial design in schools as a means to continually raise and engage with questions concerning the how, why, and where of education.