How Did Temporary HORSA Classrooms Revolutionise Education?

The key to effective education is providing a robust, versatile and comfortable environment to allow students to effectively focus.

The first step to achieving this is through the design and construction of school buildings, and with RAAC issues forcing many classes into temporary structures, it is essential that these buildings are similarly fit for purpose and give students the best possible chance to succeed.

There is a very lengthy connection between modular classroom buildings and UK schools, which are often built not only as a temporary solution during vital renovations but also to accommodate additional students as a result of changes in education policy.

Arguably the most famous of these are the HORSA huts and ROSLA blocks, in 1947 and 1972 respectively. But what were they and why were they so significant to the history of education?

Raising The Roofs

Since compulsory education was established in England and Wales, the leaving age for students has gradually increased from ten in 1880, 11 in 1893, 12 in 1899 and up to 14 in 1918, although even at that point the ultimate goal was education until the age of 18, as it is today.

In 1939, the government led by Neville Chamberlain proposed increasing the school leaving age to 15 with a plan to increase it to 16 as soon as it “has become practicable”, although the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 delayed the progress of these plans significantly.

By 1944, when it was becoming evident that the Allies were likely to win and the focus shifted towards rebuilding the country following the Blitz, the Education Act 1944 received royal assent, but it would take three further years for it to come into force.

The main issue was that increasing the leaving age by a year meant that 168,000 more students needed classrooms that would allow them to learn effectively. Much like the related plans to build huge numbers of homes to replace those destroyed by the Luftwaffe, prefabrication was the only way that this was deemed to be possible.

This led to the development of HORSA, the “Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School-Leaving Age”, which culminated in the construction of 928 brand-new primary schools and 7,000 classrooms in just five years between 1945 and 1950.

Led by then-Minister of Education George Tomlinson, the main tool for expanding education provision was the HORSA hut, a distinctive flat-pack timber and concrete building reminiscent of similar prefabricated structures used by the British Army.

Because of this, they were designed to be built extraordinarily quickly and easily; given that homes were also being constructed at the same time, there was a concern that the HORSA project could take resources away from the Emergency Factory Made developments.

Ultimately this turned out not to be the case, and the HORSA scheme was completed by 1950.

However, whilst the compromise plan was intended to be a temporary measure only designed to last a decade, several HORSA huts lasted over half a century, often remaining in fairly poor condition, featuring little architectural merit by themselves and having corrugated roofing made with asbestos.

Despite this, the HORSA huts were a critical part of fundamental changes to the education system. The Tripartite System was implemented at the same time, there was a baby boom that took place in the mid-1940s and there were changes to the purpose and focus of education that were ultimately shaped by the HORSA huts.

The positives were that hundreds of thousands of children who would previously have entered the workplace in their early teens would have another year of education, ones that would ideally teach them skills and subjects relevant to their career paths as determined by tests such as the Eleven Plus.

The HORSA huts allowed for schools to accept more students, but at the same time, the nature of their design and construction changed the focus of final-year education from the proposed technical, vocational and career-driven courses to a continuation of the existing school structure.

By the mid-1960s, HORSA huts were still being used and plans were being drawn up to raise the leaving age to 16, necessitating another wave of temporary school construction often known as ROSLA blocks after the “Raising Of School Leaving Age” programme they were constructed in aid of.

Similarly to HORSA huts, ROSLA blocks lasted far longer than they were designed for despite being relatively cheap and easy to build within just a few days and enabled the establishment of not only a five-year secondary school system but also the development of sixth-form services that would themselves become compulsory in the 2010s.