Students' perceptions of their school environments and the relationship with educational outcomes.

In recent years there has been a substantial investment in the school estate within the UK. This investment has been accompanied by a debate on the quality of these new school buildings and the role that they may have within the education system. The view taken in this paper is that this debate is constrained by the paucity of research on school environments and the subsequent lack of an effective evidence base. In order to address this problem, this study aims to understand and measure how secondary school students perceive their physical school environments and identify how these perceptions relate to key educational outcomes. Data was collected through a combination of focus groups and a large scale survey of three different year groups of students across seven secondary schools in Scotland. The results indicated that students' perceptions of their physical school environment are related to key educational outcomes and the way in which they interact with their environment. However, the findings also indicate the danger of considering school students as a homogenous group. The implication of these findings for understanding the impact of school environments will be discussed.