What is practical work?

As part of its Building Schools for the Future project, the Government in England is spending huge sums of money on building new schools and refurbishing old ones. To ensure this is wisely spent it has set up Project Faraday to develop exemplar designs for new laboratories that can then be replicated elsewhere. So far, so good. The problem is that some of those involved in creating these new designs have very little understanding of what science is about. As a result, some laboratories may not be suitable for one of the most fundamental aspects of science education, ie practical work.