Data was collected through focus groups and a questionnaire that includes questions from a sur-vey of student attitudes used before and after a secondary school rebuild (Rudd et al. The focus is on the studentsвЂ™ existing attitudes to learning, their expectations of the new building and their involvement in the change process. This paper reports the initial stage of research that will follow an English secondary school (students aged 13-18) through a re-build under the Priority School Building Programme (PSBP), which replaced BSF. Such beliefs about the benefits of participation were key to the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, initiated in 2003, but discontinued in 2010, amid criticism from the James Review (2011) that participation is expensive and inefficient. This idea has parallels with participatory practices in planning, architecture and design that are clearly of particular relevance to school re-building. Research within education consistently suggests the importance of participation in change processes, with more successful change occurring when school staff and students are ac-tively involved in planning and enacting the change. Thus a new school building, replacing a degraded, dated building has the potential to be a catalyst for other educational changes, enhancing morale and changing attitudes, but this is not a certainty. As Briggs notes 'the physical environment is a visible sign of the school's culture' (Briggs, 2001: 176) and the ethos of the school affects the way space is en-gaged with, organised and used (Uline et al., 2009). Physical spaces of education have a complex, dynamic relationship with the activities that take place in them.

Ischool for the future