During the last decades, the investments on new school buildings and retrofitting of existing buildings have been considerable in Norway and it will continue for the next years. A characteristic of this period have also been a development of the teaching methods and as a consequence of that, a change of the area planning and room layout, in the beginning without considering the acoustic challenges sufficiently. The acoustical norms, guidelines, and recommendations for schools were revised afterwards. Important issues in these documents were on reverberation time, speech intelligibility, and on background noise necessary for sufficient conditions during the educational process. The paper will present the development of the acoustical requirements and recommendations in this period together with some layout examples. The revised requirements and recommendations have been based on international experiences and some Norwegian research studies. The paper will present some results from these studies, both from measurements of relevant parameters and evaluation of student perception. The analysis will focus on the reverberation time, signal no noise ratio, and how to prevent noise in the classroom area from adjacent spaces. Finally, the paper will give some suggestions on how to improve the acoustical conditions in the spaces for the future.