School by Design: Transforming Learning, Culture and Place brings together decades of research and practice to reimagine schools as ecosystems to be designed, rather than machines to be fixed. This means learning, culture, and space are not separate conversations. This book shows how these three elements interact and why their alignment determines whether transformation thrives or fades.
At its heart, the book explores one central question:
What becomes possible when we intentionally design schools around how people learn, work, and flourish?
Many schools embark on a vision for transformation with enthusiasm, yet momentum often slows over time. Practice in new buildings revert to old habits, innovative strategies can lose coherence, and maintaining the desired culture struggles to keep pace. Through her PhD research, Dr. Anne Knock found that this is rarely due to lack of willingness, effort or ideas. Instead, transformation falters when design is missing. She concludes that applying design processes to shaping school culture, ways of working, everyday practices, as well as the physical environment becomes a critical mindset.
Dr. Knock drew on the philosophical foundation of complexity theory to underpin her work, seeing schools not as predictable machines but as dynamic ecosystems. This perspective helped her explore how small shifts in culture or space can ripple outward, creating new patterns of collaboration, engagement, and learning.
School by Design: Transforming Learning, Culture and Place introduces a practical, design-led framework for school transformation. The book introduces the Foundations for Change, where Dr. Knock frames her experience, research and implications for schools. The Playbook that follows allows for practical action, centred around four interconnected domains:
Learner Experience
Workplace Culture
Organisation & Systems
Physical & Material Environments.
Together, these domains form the “learning ecosystem,” where each element shapes, and is shaped by, the others. When designed together, they create coherence; when addressed separately, they create siloes.
A key insight from the research is the idea of samepageness, an emergent cultural quality that signals shared purpose and clarity of direction. Dr. Knock’s PhD thesis explored successful and sustainable co-teaching teams working in innovative learning environments, and ‘being on the same page’ became a consistent theme in the findings. It is not seen as ensuring uniformity; rather, it is the organising energy that enables people to move in the same direction while still expressing professional agency and identity. It becomes visible in the way teams collaborate, how they use space effectively, and how daily practice is shaped.
The book is grounded in real-world stories of schools navigating change, the successes, the tensions, and the subtle cultural shifts that determine whether school transformation becomes embedded or remains aspirational. These narratives reveal that school improvement is not simply a technical problem to solve. It is a design challenge that requires understanding complexity, working with empathy, and creating conditions for people to do their best work.
Dr. Knock’s inspiration for writing the book came from years spent working in schools and facilitating dialogue between educators and architects. She observed how often space was designed without full consideration of pedagogy and practice, and how schools attempted cultural change without attending to the physical and structural conditions that embed new ways of working. Bridging this gap became the focus of her PhD, exploring how future-focused schools create the cultural conditions to support innovative pedagogies within contemporary learning environments.
For educators, this book offers a way to realign learning and the use of space with what we now know about motivation, agency, and engagement.
For architects and designers, it provides insights into how space becomes meaningful only when connected with culture and practice.
For school leaders, it offers a pathway to designing transformation that is sustained rather than episodic.
For strategic decision-makers, it reframes the challenge of change as a systemic design endeavour that benefits from iteration, collaboration, and a strong sense of purpose.
Ultimately, School by Design argues that schools can be places of genuine renewal: places where learning is connected, where teams feel empowered, and where the built environment supports rather than constrains possibility. Designing for this kind of learning ecosystem is not a luxury; it is essential for preparing young people for a fast-evolving and complex world.
The book invites readers to rethink not only what a school looks like, but what it feels like and how people experience belonging, clarity, creativity, and shared purpose. It offers a hopeful vision: that when we design with intention, schools become vibrant, adaptive, human-centred environments capable of continuous transformation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Anne Knock is a strategist, author, and global thought leader in future-ready education. Working at the intersection of learning, culture, and place, she has spent more than 20 years helping schools and design teams create environments that enable contemporary pedagogy and thriving professional cultures. Her PhD investigated the cultural conditions that support innovation in schools, revealing why change so often stalls — and how design can re-energise the learning ecosystem.
A Director at The Learning Future, Dr Knock partners with schools and architects to design future-focused learning environments and reimagine professional practice. For more than 15 years, she has led international study tours for educators and designers, providing first-hand insight into global exemplars of innovative practice. Dr Knock is also an active member of Learning Environments Australasia (LEA).
As a keynote speaker and facilitator she brings a warm, grounded voice to complex change, making ideas accessible and actionable for leaders, educators, and designers alike.