Architect Paul Monaghan talks of the enormous amount of time, public consultation and constant design changes needed to get such places built. True enough: but even that is relatively easy compared to the task facing those who want to bring deficient older schools up to scratch. Old schools are the Cinderellas of the education system. Little money is available to upgrade them, and such work that does take place tends to be of the sticking-plaster variety. Not so, however, at Westcliffe-on-Sea, Southend, where architects Cottrell and Vermeulen have also won an RIBA award for the latest phase of their epic ten-year struggle to update the previously crumbling and inflexible Edwardian Westborough primary school. The school could only afford its latest addition because it counted as a research project, and thus got a Government grant for half of its £160,000 cost. It is an after-school club known as “the cardboard building” because it uses a lot of that material in various ingenious ways, none of them flimsy. Most noticeable are the thick cardboard-tube pillars holding it all up, but the cladding panels and roof also use the material (made fire and waterproof). The project was carried out with structural engineers Buro Happold, better known for making the Millennium Dome stand up.

With tongue in cheek, it is designed to look like a big piece of origami, and artist Simon Patterson has painted origami instruction diagrams on the outside to reinforce the point. Cottrell and Vermeulen are good at this kind of thing - they have previously successfully designed a complete off-the-peg nursery school, named the Lilliput, made out of three Portakabins, that anyone can order and have delivered. In the end, says Brian Vermeulen, it’s not what a building is made of that matters, even if it is cardboard. “You can get hung up on materials. But it’s just a really nice building. It’s poetic, it’s light-hearted, and it has created enormous goodwill.”

All of these excellent new school buildings result from a direct engagement between architects and their clients. None of them is a Public Finance Initiative (PFI) project, which is the accountancy-led way an awful lot of very dreary school projects are now funded. It would be nice to think that anything as good as these could emerge from PFI. But it is unlikely. That benighted process favours basic, unimaginative solutions. In contrast, these schools are outrageously original.