What Can the World Learn from Nordic School Design?

LED Nordic project coordinator Tiina Mäkelä presenting the city of Jyväskylä, Finland, during the first project meeting in the summer of 2024. The LED Nordic network brings together researchers and practitioners from across the Nordic countries.

On a warm summer evening in Jyväskylä, Finland, a group of researchers, architects and educators gathered on a small boat crossing Lake Jyväsjärvi. As the boat moved slowly across the water, LED Nordic project leader Tiina Mäkelä introduced the city and its educational landscape to participants from across the Nordic region.

The scene reflected something essential about Nordic school development: learning environments are not designed by architects alone, nor by educators alone, but through dialogue between many professions.

Across the Nordic countries, this collaboration has shaped school design for more than two decades. Architects, educators and researchers work closely together to rethink traditional classrooms and create learning environments that support new pedagogical approaches, student agency and inclusive education.

Many contemporary Nordic schools now include:

• shared learning areas that allow flexible teaching arrangements

• breakout spaces for small group work and individual study

• environments designed to support inclusive and collaborative teaching

• spatial layouts that encourage interaction between teachers and students

These environments are often described internationally as examples of innovative learning environments. Yet Nordic researchers are increasingly interested in a deeper question:

How are these spaces actually used in everyday teaching and learning?

Understanding the relationship between pedagogical practices and spatial design has become a central topic in international research on learning environments.

The LED Nordic project – Impact of Learning Environment Design on Teaching, Learning and Wellbeing: A Nordic Perspective (2024–2026) brings together researchers and practitioners from across the Nordic region to explore these questions. Through school visits, research reviews and documentation of contemporary school buildings, the project aims to better understand how learning environments are designed, used and experienced in Nordic schools. 

The project also seeks to strengthen dialogue between research, architecture and educational practice, and to share Nordic experiences with the international learning environments community.

As part of this work, the LED Nordic Hybrid Seminar on 15 April 2026 will bring together researchers, educators, architects and policymakers to discuss how physical learning environments influence teaching, learning and student wellbeing. 

The Nordic experience does not offer a single model for school design. Instead, it offers something perhaps more valuable: a culture of collaboration between pedagogy, architecture and research.

In a world where education systems face rapid technological, social and environmental change, this culture of collaboration may be one of the most important lessons Nordic school design can offer internationally.

WELCOME – TERVETULOA – VÄLKOMNA – VELKOMMEN – VELKOMIN