Children need space — to think, to reflect, to grow creative muscles and to be themselves. Experts – from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to lecturers at the Institute of Education – agree, as do teachers and children themselves.

Many of the entrants in this year’s School We’d Like competition yearned to create spaces: gardens to tingle the senses or to grow produce; observatories and ponds to observe nature; even a library in a tepee that would merge inner and outer quiet space.

As primary school winner Great Sankey wrote of its all-purpose arts Splat Shed: "It would be a space for children to express themselves freely, without worrying about making a mess.” Teacher Steven Mavromichalis from secondary school winner, Chipping Norton, commented: "All schools need a place to reflect. Pupils do need their quiet time.”

The competition gave teachers and children a chance to think about important things: how to sustain our fragile world, how to collaborate with fellow pupils and how to engage with the wider community. More than 330 schools welcomed the chance to share their dreams.

Paul Tombs, outgoing head of education at Zurich Municipal, the risk management and insurance company that developed the competition in association with the Guardian Teacher Network, was a judge in the first School We’d Like competition last year.

"Seeing the good ideas and the creativity coming through was one aspect, but what was really good to see was that students developed other skills as part of it,” he said. These included collaboration, debating and standing up and presenting. "They were absolutely fantastic. Very young primary children were not fazed, even when the technology wasn’t working and they were in front of a large audience.”

Kwaid,17, from special school finalist Pendlebury centre, said: "I enjoyed the day so much. Most of all, I am proud of myself that I actually got up onstage and talked to all those people, because I suffer from horrible anxiety.”

So-called "soft skills”, such as problem-solving and team-working, encouraged by the competition and exemplified by the submissions, are sought by businesses. But they will also help the next generation tackle the problems of climate change and preservation of the natural world, says Ann Finlayson, chief executive of Sustainability and Environmental Education (Se-ed).

Finlayson adds: "In the current system, more and more young people learn to work on their own – ‘let’s get through these exams’ – but that’s not what businesses are looking for. We need to study ways to make society change.”

Surveys by the National Union of Students and Higher Education Academy show 85% of first year university students want to gain sustainability competences to: "understand people’s relationship to nature”; "analyse, using many subjects”; "act as a responsible citizen locally and globally”; and "plan for the long term as well as the short term.”

Chris Husbands, director of the Institute of Education, London University, thinks the current "obsession with individualised provision” misses one of education’s essential purposes. "What schools do above all else is provide an induction into a community,” he says.

Community involvement is one of the competition’s key criteria, says Tombs: entries are supposed to involve all participants in the life of a school, from parents and governors, to teaching and non-teaching staff, through to children of all ages. This perfectly chimes with Ofsted’s framework for school inspection, which expects schools to work in partnership with external agencies and the community to "extend the curriculum and increase the range and quality of learning opportunities for pupils”.

Husbands sees such involvement with the wider world as integral to schooling. "We need to prepare children for an unpredictable world, both with the knowledge we give them and the ways in which we ask them to learn.”

He believes that subject knowledge is part of that process. "The key life skills that formal education offers to children are reading, writing and maths. The most important social justice tool education has is to teach children to read.”

But he and other experts emphasise that being hard-edged about the basics should not be set in opposition to creativity; the two are complementary.

Pat Cochrane, chief executive of CapeUK, which promotes creativity in schools, says it’s not enough for teachers themselves to be creative; they need to foster creativity in the children. "You can’t generate creativity unless teachers have time to really reflect on what they’re doing.” To infuse the school day with creativity, leaders and teachers need to take "every opportunity to reflect on how the school day is designed and how children are involved in exploring their own learning”.

Special schools are particularly good at this, says Cochrane. "They are constantly reflecting and trying to analyse what impact a particular intervention will have.” Tracy Edwards, leader for curriculum and assessment at Swiss Cottage school in Camden – a teaching school and one of the UK’s biggest special schools – adds that this reflection should be done in concert with the children. In a school where physical environment has a huge impact on children’s access to the curriculum, "we want learners to have a voice and make decisions around how their classroom is organised.”

That is just how special schools winner River House school developed their plan to grow food and distribute it through food banks. Teacher Coleman Doyle said: "The lads really want to do this, and it’s going to change their image in the community and give them skills for their future.”

Claire Custance works on the Royal Horticultural Society’s Campaign for School Gardening. "Children gain confidence from being outside and doing something practical and non-competitive,” she says, "and working in harmony for the common good, with a sense of responsibility and the chance to change things.”