The City of Lisbon, Portugal, is working to better integrate children with disabilities at primary school level. It recently has undertaken an accessible school programme and has restored an historic building as part of this effort.

Describing primary schools in a small city in Portugal is an opportunity for an overall look at the evolution of schools in general as special public buildings. A look at four of the six primary schools in the city of Caldas da Rainha shows how these public buildings have evolved, what they...

PEB and the Ministry of Education of Portugal brought together 67 library and resource centre professionals, policy makers, educators and information technology specialists from 21 countries around the theme “Designing Schools for the Information Society: Libraries and Resource Centres”. The...

Open plan schools have been largely contested in Portugal; many teachers, administrators and even parents consider this model of schooling inappropriate and therefore a failure. Recently however the Escola da Ponte, one of the open plan schools that has survived, was recognised as one of the...

The design of this flexible school for early childhood education in Milan, Italy, takes into account children’s development and the different ways they experience space according to their age. The facilities will include not only a nursery school and kindergarten, but also a drop-in day-care...

The restoration of an historic school building in Battipaglia, Italy, will provide new public facilities and is hoped to boost urban renewal. The municipality of Battipaglia, in the province of Salerno, held an architectural competition for renovating the E. De Amicis Primary School and the...

The Intelligent Educational Training Station has been developed in Italy to meet emerging school building needs. The project, for schools from the primary to upper secondary level, proposes flexible architecture for an “intelligent school” network, and was developed by CISEM, the Centre for...

<i>This article is an extract from a presentation made by Isabel Mendinhos to the PEB Steering Committee in June 1999. The project she describes, School 2001, concerns a school for lower secondary education,</i> School E.B. 2,3 Professor Galopin de Carvalho <i>in Pendao, Portugal where she teaches.</i> A new...

A seminar entitled "Designing Tomorrow's School" was organised by the OECD Decentralised Programme on Educational Building (PEB), the Irish Ministry of Education and Science and the National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway, and was held in Galway, Ireland, in September 2002. Certain...

The roles and functions of the school library are changing rapidly and in fundamental ways. The aim of the report is to provide a set of guidelines for people involved in the design of new and existing schools – especially those involved with school libraries and their links with the local...