Catalogue description Records of the Architects and Building Branch

The Architects Branch (later Architects and Building Branch) was created in 1949, taking over responsibility for all maintained educational building in England and Wales from those divisions previously concerned with the administration of building work (i.e. those dealing with further education and the youth service, teachers' training and schools). It was set up in order to enable architects, quantity surveyors, engineers, the inspectorate and the administrative staff to work together and develop an understanding of the different aspects of their common problem. The responsibilities of the branch were to consider and control educational building projects and to study and carry out new developments in design, these responsibilities being carried out by territorial teams and development group teams respectively.

Uniform building regulations for educational establishments had been laid down in the 1944 Education Act. Before the Second World War, local education authority (LEA) building schemes had been considered on their individual merits. The building regulations were thus the first step towards standardisation and co-ordination in this field. In December 1947 the scheme for annual building programmes was first announced. LEAs were to submit proposals for a building programme for 1949, thus enabling the ministry to establish priorities in building work. To aid in the formulation of these schemes and to establish liaison with other government departments involved with construction programmes at the regional level, eleven regional priority officers (including one for Wales) were appointed in 1947. They were concerned with the allocation of labour and materials during the period of acute post-war shortage. As conditions improved their work became unnecessary and the posts were abolished in the winter of 1954-1955. To advise the ministry and LEAs on the technical aspects of construction, and more especially on the application of recent scientific discoveries, a Development Group was set up within the Architects Branch in 1948.

The foundation of the Architects and Building Branch thus marked the consolidation and rationalisation of existing administrative practices. Both the Development Group and the regional priority officers were transferred to it, and it administered the annual building programme and supervised the building regulations. In 1950 a schedule of universal cost limits, based on cost per child was introduced, establishing the final aspect of central control of local building projects. As long as a project had been included in the annual building programme, conformed to minimum safety standards laid down in the building regulations and was within the prescribed cost limits, approval for it was guaranteed.

In 1964 the Department of Education and Science established a Technical Co-ordination Working Party (TCWP), reporting to a Committee of Chairmen of Boards of Chief Architects (CAOC) of the educational building consortia of local authorities. These had been set up to promote industrialised techniques for building schools economically and on a large scale. The consortia involved were the South Eastern Architects Consortium (SEAC), the Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme (CLASP), the Second Consortium of Local Authorities (SCOLA), the Consortium for Method Building (CMB), the Consortium of Local Authorities in Wales (CLAW), the Organisation of North Western Authorities for Rationalised Design (ONWARD), the Anglian Standing Conference (ASC) and the Metropolitan Architectural Consortium for Education (MACE). Meetings of CAOC acted as a forum for the exchange of information and for the discussion of technical policy in education building.