Straight to the top of the class

The Government wants to rebuild or refurbish all England's school buildings, but are there enough good architects to do the job properly? Jay Merrick finds inspiration in an unlikely corner of Esse

There are two Dagenhams. The clichéd version might be caricatured as a kind of post-industrial tundra. Astride the A13, between the M25 and London's Docklands, it's here that the film-making Coen brothers would surely make a limey Fargo: Dagenham as the town of Brainerd, on marshland as flat and big-skied as Minnesota, with a used tyre depot, rather than a slick car dealers, as the doomed location of an absurd, and eventually murderous, money-making scheme.

There are two Dagenhams. The clichéd version might be caricatured as a kind of post-industrial tundra. Astride the A13, between the M25 and London's Docklands, it's here that the film-making Coen brothers would surely make a limey Fargo: Dagenham as the town of Brainerd, on marshland as flat and big-skied as Minnesota, with a used tyre depot, rather than a slick car dealers, as the doomed location of an absurd, and eventually murderous, money-making scheme.

The second Dagenham may momentarily recall Brainerd, but it no longer carries a "nowheresville" taint. In parts of Dagenham and Barking, semis which could have been snaffled for £100,000 three or four years ago are now worth three times that. Many Londoners who work in the City, in particular, have twigged that the A13 will get them to their job in about 40 minutes. Black cab drivers have known this for decades; so have ex-East-enders who want the suburban life and easy access to Southend and Stansted, too.

The demographics, and the median income levels, are changing fast. In a decade, provided other urban redevelopments in this patch of the vast Thames Gateway urban regeneration quilt pan out, Barking and Dagenham Council will be husbanding the resources of a rapidly evolving population. Schools, though, will be the least of their worries.

But, just off Auriel Avenue, there are no worries whatsoever. Just past the Tellytubby Field and the Monet Garden at John Perry Primary School, the government's recently announced £5bn Schools for the Future programme has been thoroughly pre-empted. Thoroughly as in the council's debt-free budgets. Thoroughly as in a head teacher, Jeannette Harris, who had a vision and pursued it. And thoroughly as in the selection of relatively untried architects, DSDHA, whose ideas for the new nursery wing have given the school's toddlers not only a touch of Bauhaus modernism, but a glimpse of a certain sculpture garden in St Ives.

The school was built in 1951, one of dozens marking the Festival of Britain - a year of symbolic renewal that conveniently mirrors the government's current splash-it-all-over educational intentions. In its bricky, steel-windowed way, the school is a notable piece of modernist architecture: layered, essentially horizontal, well-proportioned and, in places, striking in its details. Order without, order within: the atmosphere here is good; the degree of quiet calm in the school during classes is, frankly, unexpected.

But it is not as unexpected as the new nursery annexe, across the once open end of the school's central, U-shaped courtyard. Deborah Saunt, one of DSDHA's two principals, describes the wing as a "studio for children", and the phrase gets right to the nub of its design. Art is the ghost in this little modernist teaching machine.

The nursery houses up to 40 infants in unusually - though not absurdly - stimulating conditions, and it has the distinct feel of an artist's studio. The garden and play area in front of the nursery, which contains two concrete sculptures (one mirrored), were the head teacher's idea. She had been inspired by Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden in St Ives - an artistic inclination that had already given the school its own charming, fenced Monet garden: pond, bridge, daffodils, shrubs, long grass, and two complacent mallards.

Inside the building, this studio feeling persists quite strongly. The polycarbonate wall facing the courtyard glows gently; windows, set asymmetrically along a low-ish horizontal steel beam, give the children snapshot views of the play area. An angular, meandering "landscape wall", faced with cork, divides the general activities area from demarcated zones such as the womb-like special needs nook. The colours may be a little too bright for hard-core modernists - but what a fine place to trigger learning-curves, and a comfortable sense of connection and possibility.

The architects stretched the £400,000 budget to the architectural limit, and have delivered a taut essay in modernism with some surprising and satisfying inflections. That was a given: the per-square-metre cost of the nursery was higher than usual for this kind of local authority building. Special costings demand special results.

Okay, it's a shoe-box. But Saunt has manipulated the form nicely in terms of materials, space and surface. The overall scale of the nursery building, the details of its fenestration, the depth of its plinth, its rakish horizontality mesh satisfyingly with the existing wings of the school. And the striking jut of the canopy is not, after all, show-off architecture. Saunt says the cantilever "imbues the building with a monumental scale reminiscent of the industrial structures in and around Dagenham". This connection is probably irrelevant: the existing school and the local housing are the operative context. It's enough to think of the deep overhang as functional, and something that makes clear sense in terms of stratified scale, by sliding smoothly and almost weightlessly into the courtyard's visual grids.

And then there are the bricks. Make that two or three thousand bricks. Make them Dutch, and give them fascinating glazes whose colours vary in different lights: grey to violet, violet to charcoal, charcoal to blue. And arrange everything - bricks, polycarbonate, steel, aluminium, glass - so that the shoe-box has a syncopated, slightly arrhythmic vibe. Result: a small, but very arresting, building.

Saunt and her practice were working in ideal conditions. Schools such as John Perry Primary are established educational beacons, and beacon schools are much more likely to demand beacon architecture. The government wants to create hundreds more via its new Schools for the Future programme, whose remit is to rebuild or refurbish all the secondary schools in England in 15 years; the biggest such programme since the 19th century.

The spectacular cash commitment is being presented as something radically decisive and groovy. But the impressive numbers mask the complexity of the task. About £2bn will be spent in the first push, delivering 180 secondary "city academies" in England. Another £3bn will be fed into primary school development. But what kind of schools? Designed by whom? And how well managed and maintained?

The track record is discouraging. Six out of seven state schools are more than 25 years old, and 60 per cent of them have been in use for more than 60 years. Even if schools are better designed, what about their upkeep, their ability to meet change? The government's predictable answer is to fund these new schools via a mix of state money and Private Finance Initiatives. This suggests a significant percentage of new schools will be bolted on to non-educational, commercial developments.

Perhaps this can work. But it won't if the designs for new schools are less than excellent. Jon Rouse, the outgoing chief executive of the government's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, says every school building project will require a high-quality design team, and that the DfES are taking the issue of good quality design "very seriously".

But not every school project will benefit from a high-quality design team. And even those that do might still be fudged into mediocrity unless local planners - and teachers - are prepared to risk architectural solutions whose intelligence is anchored in 21st-century realities.

In an attempt to cover this angle, the DfES has activated 11 big-name architects, asking them to work with specific schools to develop theoretical "exemplar" versions of them. The stellar cast includes Lord Rogers, Will Alsop and Wilkinson Eyre.

The ideas and building forms thrown up by the magnificent 11 are often riveting. One practice, the increasingly trendy de Rijke Marsh Morgan, propose a school dominated by a multi-purpose plaza surmounted by a vast, translucent quilt; Marks Barfield, designers of the London Eye, are in the mix, too. But how can they set useful examples unless their visions are put to the test? How, exactly, would these fine architects translate their unusual architectural ideas into affordable, maintainable buildings that not only stand a chance of making the cover of Architects' Journal, but which demonstrably encourage learning and community spirit?

There are not enough really good architects available to the Schools of the Future programme. Nothing new there. In the past, a few local authority architects' departments have made extraordinary contributions to school design - Essex and Hampshire are two examples. It's equally true that great architects such as Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry have produced brilliant buildings for state schools. But these exemplary big bangs have dissolved into a general whimpering. Cash constraints, local political wrinkles, architecturally nimby-ish councils, and a swingeing fear of creativity have formed a fairly implacable bottom line. The DfES faces a huge task, tactically and strategically.

The parents of the children eddying outwards from folding glass doors into the play area at John Perry School in Dagenham need not worry about these machinations because Barking and Dagenham Council have a handle on their educational resource. It isn't perfect; but the desire for improvement in this borough is not merely theoretical; nor does it require major-dude architects. Chances are being taken, money spent. And bright, committed architects are not being treated like dangerous kryptonite. The Coen brothers wouldn't like it at all.