Advancing School Performance: Indoor environmental quality, Resilience and Educational outcomes (ASPIRE)
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Bartlett Sch of Env, Energy & Resources
Abstract
Despite the fact that 10 million children in the UK spend 30% of their life at school, around 70% of that time inside a classroom, the building design determinants of indoor environmental quality in classrooms are poorly understood to date. However, there is significant evidence that poor indoor air quality and exposure to excess indoor temperatures can have detrimental impacts on the learning performance and health of pupils, in particular asthma, placing a high burden on national health services. This is particularly important when we take into account the increased vulnerability of children's bodies to indoor environmental hazards: Children breathe more indoor air pollutants than adults for their size, have a limited ability to thermoregulate and their immune systems are still developing. School buildings are, in the meantime, responsible for 15% of the UK's total public sector carbon emissions, with energy costs associated with heating, cooling, lighting and appliances being a large portion of school budgets. The school building sector could, therefore, play a pivotal role in the UK's transition to a low carbon building stock.
Policymakers, building designers, school managers, educators and parents in the UK recognise the importance of creating healthy and low carbon school environments but they need the tools and mechanisms to identify the best strategies to achieve them. Ensuring high indoor environmental quality in our school buildings whilst meeting pressing carbon emissions reduction targets is an urgent research priority and a major engineering challenge for the UK construction industry. Addressing it will not only help tackle the Government's 2018 Industrial Strategy Clean Growth targets but also help meet national strategic needs to protect the most vulnerable in society, increase educational attainment and reduce health inequities. As a response to this challenge, the interdisciplinary project ASPIRE aims to address a key knowledge gap: Can school buildings achieve low carbon emissions whilst maintaining high indoor environmental quality that enhances learning and health?
Our work will bring together, for the first time, three of Europe's largest studies on the impact of classroom indoor air quality and temperature, and schoolchildren's learning and health in temperate climates. Their novel, systematic co-analysis will establish relationships between exposures to indoor air pollutants, temperatures and ventilation rates and cognitive performance and health symptoms for a wide range of educational settings.
We will analyse Department for Education data to construct a library of school building archetypes that are statistically representative of the UK school building stock. The archetype descriptions will include details such as interior layouts and building fabric characteristics and will be used to simulate the energy, thermal and indoor air quality performance of each archetype under low carbon building design and operational strategies in the current and future climate. These scenarios will be co-created as a result of two-way communication with stakeholders from the government, public health bodies, the construction industry and school communities during extensive, structured workshops that form an integral part of the ASPIRE project.
By using the relationships established during the systematic analysis of existing field data and the modelled indoor air pollution and temperature exposure levels, we will evaluate the impacts of building energy efficient design and operational strategies, occupancy and climate change scenarios on educational attainment, and health costs at the national level.
This tremendously exciting new project will pave the way in understanding and improving the holistic performance of low carbon, healthy school buildings, and inform the development of effective policies and best practice school design guidance in close collaboration with our stakeholders.
Policymakers, building designers, school managers, educators and parents in the UK recognise the importance of creating healthy and low carbon school environments but they need the tools and mechanisms to identify the best strategies to achieve them. Ensuring high indoor environmental quality in our school buildings whilst meeting pressing carbon emissions reduction targets is an urgent research priority and a major engineering challenge for the UK construction industry. Addressing it will not only help tackle the Government's 2018 Industrial Strategy Clean Growth targets but also help meet national strategic needs to protect the most vulnerable in society, increase educational attainment and reduce health inequities. As a response to this challenge, the interdisciplinary project ASPIRE aims to address a key knowledge gap: Can school buildings achieve low carbon emissions whilst maintaining high indoor environmental quality that enhances learning and health?
Our work will bring together, for the first time, three of Europe's largest studies on the impact of classroom indoor air quality and temperature, and schoolchildren's learning and health in temperate climates. Their novel, systematic co-analysis will establish relationships between exposures to indoor air pollutants, temperatures and ventilation rates and cognitive performance and health symptoms for a wide range of educational settings.
We will analyse Department for Education data to construct a library of school building archetypes that are statistically representative of the UK school building stock. The archetype descriptions will include details such as interior layouts and building fabric characteristics and will be used to simulate the energy, thermal and indoor air quality performance of each archetype under low carbon building design and operational strategies in the current and future climate. These scenarios will be co-created as a result of two-way communication with stakeholders from the government, public health bodies, the construction industry and school communities during extensive, structured workshops that form an integral part of the ASPIRE project.
By using the relationships established during the systematic analysis of existing field data and the modelled indoor air pollution and temperature exposure levels, we will evaluate the impacts of building energy efficient design and operational strategies, occupancy and climate change scenarios on educational attainment, and health costs at the national level.
This tremendously exciting new project will pave the way in understanding and improving the holistic performance of low carbon, healthy school buildings, and inform the development of effective policies and best practice school design guidance in close collaboration with our stakeholders.
Planned Impact
The beneficiaries of the ASPIRE research outcomes include UK Government departments and regulatory agencies, local Government, the building construction industry and, in particular, practitioners and professional organisations and associations involved in the design, construction and maintenance of school buildings. Schools and communities will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the proposed work due to improved indoor air quality, comfort and sense of wellbeing in classrooms, increased work productivity for teachers and academic performance for pupils. This will, in turn, increase educational attainment, which is a key indicator of wellbeing at the population level, thus resulting into significant socioeconomic benefits for the entire UK population. Fuller details of the beneficiaries and associated pathways to impacts are provided in the 'Pathways to Impact' section of our proposal.
Reducing the energy use and carbon emissions of our school buildings around the country is vital for the Government's climate change mitigation targets. Building construction and management professionals, public health professionals, local authorities, school staff, parents and communities urgently need a toolkit that will help them select the most effective low carbon building solutions that do not jeopardise children's cognitive performance, health and wellbeing. Currently, however, this topic is underresearched and commonly neglected by the many actors involved in the design, delivery, operation and maintenance of a school building. To limit the potential unintended consequences of strict energy efficiency standards on indoor air quality and overheating, a systematic, interdisciplinary approach is needed.
We very much view the ASPIRE project as the first step towards developing a strategic multi-stakeholder research platform that will involve all actors participating in the creation of low carbon, healthy and productive indoor learning spaces. Our experienced research team will work alongside our excellent stakeholder team to a) assess the relevance of the project findings for building regulations, building construction standards and public health protection guidance for learning environments and b) generate new, evidence based, best practice guidance for the design and retrofit of school buildings from a layman's perspective that will be disseminated to industry and policy audiences by our Project Partners (Department for Education, Public Health England, the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, Architype, Atelier Ten).
To reflect the importance of accelerating the impact of the project, we have developed an entire Work Package dedicated to our stakeholder engagement and impact activities with devoted specific investigator time and PDRA resources. Throughout the project, we will be actively supported by the UCL Public Engagement Unit and the UCL Bartlett Strategic Communications team to effectively engage with this diverse range of stakeholders and beneficiaries. A particular strength of this integrated approach is that research dissemination occurs organically through participation of the stakeholders in the co-creation of knowledge during the collaborative workshops and frequent project meetings. Our stakeholder team consists of representatives of the government, policy and industry sectors, and school communities, with many of whom we have already actively engaged to help us shape the present project proposal.
Reducing the energy use and carbon emissions of our school buildings around the country is vital for the Government's climate change mitigation targets. Building construction and management professionals, public health professionals, local authorities, school staff, parents and communities urgently need a toolkit that will help them select the most effective low carbon building solutions that do not jeopardise children's cognitive performance, health and wellbeing. Currently, however, this topic is underresearched and commonly neglected by the many actors involved in the design, delivery, operation and maintenance of a school building. To limit the potential unintended consequences of strict energy efficiency standards on indoor air quality and overheating, a systematic, interdisciplinary approach is needed.
We very much view the ASPIRE project as the first step towards developing a strategic multi-stakeholder research platform that will involve all actors participating in the creation of low carbon, healthy and productive indoor learning spaces. Our experienced research team will work alongside our excellent stakeholder team to a) assess the relevance of the project findings for building regulations, building construction standards and public health protection guidance for learning environments and b) generate new, evidence based, best practice guidance for the design and retrofit of school buildings from a layman's perspective that will be disseminated to industry and policy audiences by our Project Partners (Department for Education, Public Health England, the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, Architype, Atelier Ten).
To reflect the importance of accelerating the impact of the project, we have developed an entire Work Package dedicated to our stakeholder engagement and impact activities with devoted specific investigator time and PDRA resources. Throughout the project, we will be actively supported by the UCL Public Engagement Unit and the UCL Bartlett Strategic Communications team to effectively engage with this diverse range of stakeholders and beneficiaries. A particular strength of this integrated approach is that research dissemination occurs organically through participation of the stakeholders in the co-creation of knowledge during the collaborative workshops and frequent project meetings. Our stakeholder team consists of representatives of the government, policy and industry sectors, and school communities, with many of whom we have already actively engaged to help us shape the present project proposal.
Organisations
Publications
Dawkins L
(2024)
Quantifying overheating risk in English schools: A spatially coherent climate risk assessment
in Climate Risk Management
Dong J
(2023)
The impact of climate change on cognitive performance of children in English school stock: A simulation study
in Building and Environment
Dong J
(2023)
A review of approaches and applications in building stock energy and indoor environment modelling
in Building Services Engineering Research and Technology
Godoy-Shimizu D
(2021)
Reducing emissions in London schools with photovoltaics
in Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Godoy-Shimizu D
(2022)
Pathways to improving the school stock of England towards net zero
in Buildings and Cities
Grassie D
(2023)
Dynamic modelling of indoor environmental conditions for future energy retrofit scenarios across the UK school building stock
in Journal of Building Engineering
Grassie D
(2022)
Energy retrofit and passive cooling: overheating and air quality in primary schools
in Buildings and Cities
Description | In the context of the ASPIRE project, we created: • A knowledge exchange platform within the research community that facilitated the review, comparison, benchmarking and validation of data on the performance of school buildings, and strategies aiming to reduce their energy consumption and improve their indoor environmental quality. • A novel approach for auto-generation, simulation, post-processing and analysis of EnergyPlus UK classroom archetype models using DfE's Property Data Survey Programme (PDSP) database of over 18,000 schools. Such modelling facilitates the multi-parameter evaluation of school building performance, whilst incorporating building stock-wide heterogeneity and longitudinal dynamic changes. This approach can be adopted by other academic researchers in the UK and elsewhere to address similar research aims. • A health impact assessment model to quantify the resulting burden of childhood asthma incidence by combining regional health and population data with exposure-response functions from a recent high-quality systematic review/meta-analysis. • A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework to be used by policymakers to determine the optimal combination of energy efficiency and indoor air quality schemes for English school classrooms. |
Exploitation Route | • Our archetype-based school building stock modelling tool can be used to quantify the exposure of UK schoolchildren to indoor air contaminants and high summer temperatures in school buildings designed or retrofitted under a range of energy efficiency retrofit packages and indoor environmental quality improvement strategies (both building fabric interventions and operational strategies), in the current and future climate. This tool can be taken forward in the future by easily expanding/updating the climate scenarios, and retrofit and operational strategies being simulated. • The evaluation of impacts of retrofitting schools on exposure to air pollutants and their effects on children's health will be of interest to public health policymakers, building construction practitioners, school facilities managers and other stakeholders responsible for the provision of healthy school environments. |
Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy Construction Education Energy Environment Healthcare Government Democracy and Justice |
Description | As the project was recently completed, impact may occur at a later stage, however, potential impact pathways currently being explored are outlined below: Academic impact: The academic beneficiaries of the ASPIRE project span those disciplines interested in matters relating to the areas of indoor air quality, energy efficiency and climate change adaptation of school buildings. Our school building stock model can be updated to incorporate new retrotit/climate scenarios, and the overall approach is transferable to other climatic contexts. Policy impact: Our study on the effect of energy efficiency interventions consisting of combinations of retrofit and operational strategies aiming to improve indoor air quality and thermal comfort on asthma incidence and associated hospitalisation costs in UK schools may be of interest to public health policymakers and stakeholders responsible for the provision of school retrofit programmes. Industry impact: The project outcomes could potentially inform further revision of CIBSE technical memoranda or other school design guidance documents. |
First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Construction,Education,Energy,Environment,Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |
Impact Types | Societal Economic Policy & public services |
Description | Adapting school designs for health and wellbeing during and post pandemic |
Amount | £10,022,078 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/R511638/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 08/2021 |
End | 03/2023 |
Description | School Buildings Adaptation, Resilience and Impacts on Decarbonisation in a Changing Climate (ARID) |
Amount | £45,505 (GBP) |
Funding ID | NE/V01000X/1 |
Organisation | Natural Environment Research Council |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 08/2020 |
End | 08/2022 |
Title | Data dRiven Engine for Archetype Models of Schools (DREAMS) |
Description | In the context of the ASPIRE project, we developed the Data dRiven Engine for Archetype Models of Schools (DREAMS), a novel, data-driven, archetype-based school building stock modelling framework. DREAMS enables the detailed representation of the school building stock in England through the statistical analysis of two large scale and highly detailed databases provided by the UK Government: (i) the Property Data Survey Programme (PDSP) from the Department for Education (DfE), and (ii) Display Energy Certificates (DEC). |
Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | School building stock modelling frameworks such as DREAMS can be powerful tools that aid decision-makers to quantify and evaluate the impact of a wide range of building stock-level policies, energy efficiency interventions and climate change scenarios on school energy and indoor environmental performance. |
Description | Presentation by Duncan Grassie at Futurebuild 2023 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Presentation by Duncan Grassie at Futurebuild 2023 during the 'Retrofitting Schools' session |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
URL | https://www.futurebuild.co.uk/guest/duncan-grassie-university-college-london/ |
Description | Presentation by Prof Anna Mavrogianni at the April/May 2023 Springtime Lunchtime Seminar Series |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Prof Anna Mavrogianni spoke about indoor environmental quality in UK schools in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation and presented the ASPIRE project methods and findings during a TAPAS network webinar. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-TNQ0e6aUs |
Description | Presentation by Prof Anna Mavrogianni at the Breathing City - Future Urban Ventilation Network Autumn-Winter 2022-23 Seminar Series |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Webinar talk as part of the Breathing City - Future Urban Ventilation Network Autumn-Winter 2022-23 Seminar Series with the title "Indoor environmental quality, energy efficiency, climate resilience and educational outcomes: a school building stock modelling framework" |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | http://breathingcity.org/events/ |