Abstract
The socially sustainable school is an emergent conceptappearedwithin the context of many significant changes in the world schools’ designs.Also, the functional performance is considered as a principal constituent for the socially sustainable schools. On the other hand, Iraqi schools are suffering, generally, from being of low functional performance; a problem resulted, as this research believes, from certain forms of considering the spatial adjacency and syntactic properties which are the mostinfluencing factors for the schools’ functional performance. This research tackles the problem that there are no clear conceptions about the extent and how those properties are consideredin the design practices of the Iraqi elementary schools. It adopts the objective of defining these conceptions using a method which includes defining the related influencing spatial adjacency and syntactic properties firstly, then measuringto what extent and how the defined properties are considered in the designs of Iraqi schools in comparision withthe world design practice framed by the general theory of the socially sustainable schools. After discussing the results, the final conclusions which define theweaknesses and defecitsof the local schools’ design practices regarding the consideration of the properties of interest are presented
