Strategies, Programs, Regulations
Austria is a federal state with a fairly complex distribution of tasks and responsibilities. This is also true of its built educational infrastructure. Across all areas of the school system (not including early childhood education and higher education), there are 5 936 school locations where 1 172 400 students are taught by 126 650 teachers. [→ 1] Responsibility for the construction and operation of these schools is unequally shared between federal administration, the states, and municipalities. The authorities responsible for operating and maintaining the “compulsory general education schools” at 4 429 locations are usually at the municipal level. In the secondary education sector, 357 sites are “academic secondary schools” and 544 are “intermediate and higher vocational schools.” Around 600 of these fall under federal jurisdiction, while the remainder are private schools. Although the federal states build and operate schools in only a limited number of cases, their role is particularly significant in the compulsory school sector, as they provide municipalities with substantial budgetary contributions for new construction and renovation projects.
In 2022, funding for the education system amounted to approximately 26 billion euros, or 5.3 percent of GDP and 10 percent of public expenditures. [→ 2] The vast majority of this funding was allocated to ongoing operational costs, especially personnel, while capital expenditures—such as construction, renovation, major maintenance projects, and the procurement or replacement of equipment—accounted for a comparatively small portion. [→ 3] AThese cost categories can, however, be difficult to unbraid, particularly when paid as rent rather than recorded as investment, as occurs with the City of Vienna’s schools and with federal schools leased by the ministry from the federal real estate company BIG through PPP projects.
One explicit nationwide strategy for the expansion of school infrastructure continues to have an impact today: the 1971 federal objective to ensure that every child in Austria has access to a school offering the Matura qualification (a high school diploma allowing university attendance) within a radius of 25 kilometers or a travel time of 30 minutes. This goal led to a massive expansion of capacities in the sector. To achieve it, in 1971 the Federal School Development Programme (SCHEP) was established, which sets targets at roughly ten‑year horizons. The current SCHEP 2020 has a volume of 2.4 billion euros allocated across 250 projects over a decade—an increase of 700 million euros over the previous cycle. For its implementation, the federal government relies primarily on the BIG, whose portfolio consists predominantly of schools and university buildings. The BIG plays a key role in ensuring quality in federal school construction, not least by implementing quality-assurance procedures (architecture competitions) and commissioning architects for general planning.
Information Hub ÖISS
The Ministry of Education does not issue its own guidelines for school construction. Instead, it works together with the Austrian Institute for School and Sports Facilities (ÖISS), founded in 1964, to create regulations. As a federal foundation financed jointly by the federal government and the states, the ÖISS functions today as an information hub that facilitates professional exchange among a wide range of actors, particularly within administrative structures and through symposia, excursions, and its own journal. Working together with state authorities, the ÖISS has developed numerous guidelines on topics ranging from technical issues such as natural lighting and acoustics to spatial-pedagogical concepts and the design of outdoor spaces. Over the past 15 years, the ÖISS has also established itself as an advisory institution for Phase Zero, and in the transfer of its outcomes into competition briefs.
A significant change in the Austrian education system was the 2019 establishment of an education directorate in each state, replacing the former state school boards, which now operate a joint administration run jointly by national and state governments. Although the education directorates’ main focus is on pedagogical fields, school organization, and legal matters, they also assume an important role in the development of the built school infrastructure. Within each directorate, there are separate departments for compulsory education and for federal schools. The departments responsible for federal schools act, in effect, as the Ministry’s local extension and are deeply involved at the project level in renovation, expansion, and new construction. The departments responsible for compulsory school buildings operate largely at the strategic level, collaborating, for instance, with the respective state government departments to develop regulatory frameworks such as school building ordinances. By analyzing demographic trends, these departments also conduct project-specific needs assessments, which in Upper Austria, for example, lead to corresponding notices regarding spatial requirements. Strategic objectives may also lead to project-level guidance from the education directorate on topics such as inclusion or after-school care.
The education directorates have taken widely varying approaches in their formulation of regulatory frameworks for school construction. Some ordinances encompass entire functional and spatial programs with precise floor-area requirements and highly detailed specifications, down to a requirement that skirting boards be five centimeters high and made of wood or plastic. Others respond to recent developments with directives that address not only the built object but also processes for quality assurance during implementation. The Vorarlberg school building ordinance is exemplary in this regard. It still lists required functional spaces—though without specifying floor areas—and also outlines general requirements for spaces, which include flexibility for different teaching formats and opportunities for diverse forms of the students’ self-directed activity. Above all, it asks schools to see the planning of the building project as an opportunity to reflect on school development and to actively engage users as experts on their own environment: “The basis for the planning of the school building shall be a spatial and pedagogical concept that guides the function of spaces, the organizational structures, and the necessary floor areas of each space.” [→ 4] This ordinance essentially codifies an approach that is already widely practiced in most Vorarlberg municipalities and has resulted in ambitious education-sector building programs. For example, Dornbirn, with 52 000 inhabitants the largest city in Vorarlberg, presented a school space concept as early as 2009, projecting investments of 100 million euros by 2030. The city later increased this amount to 113 million euros, enabling the goals to largely be achieved.
Greenhouses of the Future
A significant impetus for this program came from developments in southern Germany and Switzerland. In 2004, Reinhard Kahl’s film portraying schools as “greenhouses of the future” [Treibhäuser der Zukunft] caused a stir, and in 2008 he organized a congress on reform in the Festspielhaus Bregenz, with 1 500 participants attending. There was a radical reference model just an hour away by train: On Lake Constance in Romanshorn, Switzerland, the “House of Learning” was founded in 1980 by Peter Fratton, one of Europe’s most renowned school innovators. While these models were not adopted in detail, they still contributed to the high status of education in Vorarlberg. In its current branding strategy, the region even positions itself as becoming “the most promising environment for children by 2035.” [→ 5]
In the neighboring province of Tyrol, the school construction ordinance is not legally binding, however since 2023 there has been a practice-oriented “School Building Guide,” developed jointly by the state’s building department and the education directorate, primarily aimed at municipalities applying for construction project funding. It outlines the procedural steps from developing a spatial-pedagogical concept through to the competition phase and on to financing and groundbreaking. It also names overarching goals for village renewal and sustainability: Town centers are to be prioritized over peripheral locations, and building within existing structures is preferred to new construction. While in Vorarlberg external experts are usually brought on board the team to help create the spatial-pedagogical concept, the Tyrolean guidelines stipulate that it be created by the local team together with the education directorate. Within the framework of the Quality Management System for Schools (QMS), a guiding pedagogical concept [→ 6] is developed and a summary created from it, containing the relevant planning points.
The Campus Model
Vienna is a special case, not least due to its demographic development, as in recent decades its population has grown significantly and become more diverse. While the city had just over 1.5 million inhabitants in 1990, this number grew to 1.7 million by 2010, and was projected to reach 2 million by 2025. The factors contributing to this growth were the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of the EU to the east, along with various waves of migration stemming from conflicts ranging from the Balkan wars of the 1990s to the current war in Ukraine.
The city launched its first major investment program in the early 1990s, when the effects of EU eastward expansion on population were becoming noticeable. The “School Building Program 2000” attracted international attention: The new schools were more colorful, spatially varied, and complex than the standard repertoire had previously been. However, nothing changed in the fundamental typology of the traditional corridor school with its sequence of classrooms measuring 9 by 7 meters, as the design of teaching spaces was still governed by strict regulations that prescribed nearly every detail, from room size down to the number of curtain rails.
After the program concluded, in around 2005, the concept of combining different educational institutions within new building complexes emerged—from kindergarten to primary school to middle school. The aim was to provide shared infrastructure such as gymnasiums, cafeterias, libraries, and more. The original plan was to develop standardized solutions for these large institutions, which would only need to be adapted to the respective site. In practice, however, strong protest from the architectural profession led to the introduction of individual competitions, which maintained the previous school building guidelines and allowed for only limited innovation.
A turning point came with a competition for just such a full-day facility—combining kindergarten, primary school, and middle school—in the Sonnwendviertel of Vienna’s Favoriten district (→ Project 4). The competition brief demonstrated that the stakeholders on the city side were genuinely interested in innovation, and the outcome showed that at least some architects were ready to deliver corresponding design proposals. The Vienna campus model has been continuously evolving since then, passing through several stages. The leap to the second generation is particularly notable: The Campus Plus model no longer separates kindergarten and primary schools, instead joining them together in shared clusters. This makes it easier for children to transition between institutions and allows for a more individualized progression.
Under the name BIENE (Bildungseinrichtungen Neubauprogramm—New Building Program for Educational Institutions), 14 campus projects have been realized in Vienna so far, with 9 more planned by 2034. Between 2012 and 2023, around 700 million euros were invested in the now completed projects. [→ 7] In parallel, two school renovation budget packages are also being implemented. The current budget package, launched in 2018, is set at 570 million euros, plus an additional 100 million euros for a special funding pool for innovative projects.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Austria does not have a nationwide strategy for school building in Austria. The states and municipalities—with the latter depending on state funding frameworks—have considerable leeway to shape their own strategies and programs, which aligns with the federal structure of the Austrian nation. In recent years, the call for user participation has gained traction among local stakeholders; however, although widely preached, it is often implemented only partially or not at all. So far, very few genuinely radical pedagogical ideas have emerged from within the schools themselves.
As a comparison, we can look at the Dutch school system, in which the state finances 100 percent of costs but directly operates only about one third of schools, with the remaining two thirds being privately run. These private providers must meet specific criteria and demonstrate demand for their educational services, but are otherwise autonomous in developing their educational vision and in daily operations. Under these conditions, it is clear that a higher degree of innovation can be expected. On the other hand, the state administrations have considerable leverage to quickly and broadly disseminate innovation, as the Vienna campus model and the Vorarlberg examples impressively demonstrate. If, in the coming years—especially by using AI as a new form of “learning support”—a genuine pedagogical and didactic transformation occurs, it will be necessary to loosen federal structures, strengthen the voice of educators, and promote communication in both directions: top-down and bottom-up.