Recently I was invited to be on the panel for a webinar about Sustainable Schools: to give a pre-recorded presentation and then take part in a question and answers session. This didn’t happen because the organisers, who had £600,00 of cash in the bank, didn’t want to pay me, and I refused to work for a commercial organisation for free.
Nevertheless this prompted me to think about what I would have said and what follows is a bit of a brain dump of what I would have turned into a presentation. I haven’t turned it into an essay, but I hope it still makes sense.
Here goes:
Sustainability must address and integrate all three aspects of ‘sustainability’;
Environmental Sustainability,
Economic Sustainability,
Social Sustainability
First of all, we must start properly by designing and building schools with the energy use aspects of environmental sustainability in mind.
We must design for energy efficiency and the local climate.
Insulate to keep heat in and heat out (as appropriate and required according to the time of year)
Use Passive measures: orientate the building and its uses for passive heating and cooling. I am still shocked that most developments I see totally ignore the opportunities for passive heating, and ignore the possibilities of over heating in the summer. Even in temperate UK this is important, yet is largely ignored. Look at any new housing estate to see how true this is – no thought given to orientation at all. I am not sure that I have ever seen a planning application where this is considered; but it should be.
Consider the choices between Passive Ventilation and the use of M&E systems. Start by considering how and when passive ventilation can be used, and where this will require to be supplemented by mechanical ventilation, and where heat recovery should be incorporated.
All of this requires striking a balance: there are different techniques and strategies which can be employed – so employ an environmental engineer in the design team from day one (or even before day one).
Use the local landscape – trees and the prevailing wind etc. Explore what existing trees can be used to shade out unwanted summer heat, or could be used to reduce harsh winter winds. Can the prevailing winds be used to provide summer cooling and to help provide fresh air. In Germany each city’s masterplan must take account of prevailing winds, and tall buildings are not allowed to be located where they would block or interfere with the benefit of the prevailing wind on the rest of the city. Explore how you can create new landscape and landscapes to help meet your environmental (including energy use) goals – for example, do you need to plant new trees to provide shade or block freezing winds? And can you use the local landscape as part of your site’s drainage strategy and system?
Keep existing trees and plant new trees for shading and biodiversity considering the building, the playground, and any surrounding fields and grounds.
Use the landscape for SuDs (sustainable drainage); water control and flood mitigation of the wider area and surroundings.
Link the site and its environment to the wider environment creating wildlife corridors. With climate change this will be increasingly important – the wildlife will need to be able to move to get to the climate that suits them.
Schools Admission Policy is actually an important part of a sustainability strategy. A school’s catchment should mean that children and students can (and do) walk to school and not be driven there by parents or even by public transport. Many years ago when I went to Junior School we all walked to school: children in the same road would meet up and walk to school together, meeting up with other children on the way until eventually there was a torrent of school children converging on our school from all directions. At my Secondary School, again we all walked to school apart from a few that cycled. So, the admissions policy which is really a political decision can have a large environmental effect. Currently, where I live, children are literally bussed into our borough’s schools, and children from our borough are in turn bussed to schools in a neighbouring one!
School Dinners – use as part of a wider, integrated strategy incorporating local food production; health; land use; industrial, employment, and training strategies. Having a Free School Dinners Policy for all children should be used to enable this integrated strategy.
Schools should be embed in the Local Plan – land use policy (i.e. Town and Country Planning ) should be used to integrate all of these issues and they need to be incorporated into laws, regulations and policies. Schools should be part of Integrated Land Use Planning – residential, business, commercial. and environmental.
The school should be integrated into the neighbourhood – in all ways.
Energy Hub – the school, as a major building and employer, should generate its own energy and supply surplus energy to its neighbours. Schools should become a District Heating Hub and Heat Network for neighbours.
Solar Power – PV and Thermal (located on roofs and in the grounds) must be a given, both for new schools but also retrofitted as part of a local zero carbon strategy.
Where schools have large playing fields they should have wind turbines (not massive ones) to generate electricity.
Schools should be locations for Combined Heat and Power(CHP) plants – using heat pumps including ground source heat pumps, and Waste to Energy via Anaerobic Digestion (AD). One of my old schools was next to a large lake which could have been used as an energy source for a heat pump. Many schools have large playing fields which could be used with heat pumps with a network of heat collectors beneath. Digging up a school’s field on an industrial scale must be more efficient, and effective, than digging up a few hundred near-by private gardens (which will never be done anyway).
In addition to school fields we could use other near-by open spaces as locations for ground source heat pumps to feed into a neighbourhood wide energy system. Within a hundred yards of where I live, in an outer London Borough, there are two schools with large playing fields plus a large open space which could be used to supply energy to their surrounding homes via ground source heat pumps. This is repeated all over my Borough.
Schools should be locations for energy storage (batteries, thermal storage, etc).
In short, schools should be neighbourhood energy hubs
As well as Energy Hubs schools should be Community Hubs – with many and multiple uses.
There should be community use for: school halls; meeting rooms; sports pitches; rehearsal and performance spaces; evening classes.
School canteens/Restaurants/Dining Halls – should be shared with local elders, local businesses, and the local community.
School kitchens should be used after hours for dark kitchens or evening dining,
School should have Art Studios for local artists – and we should have artists in residence in the school and the neighbourhood.
Schools should share their technical equipment – ‘Make Labs’: woodworking; metal working; laser cutting machines, 3D Printing; etc.
Schools should be part of ‘Super Hubs’ – incorporating all large public and commercial buildings, and homes; generating and sharing energy.
Homes should not only be near schools but also could be above them as part of the same building.
All of this is really a sensible integration of things and uses; and of not working in ‘silos’.
What makes this hard (difficult?) or impossible?
NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS – Leaving everything to’ the market’ and the fake argument that ‘there isn’t the money to do this’
Governments that have their own currencies always have enough money to do what they want to do. The UK Government has its own currency.
The stumbling block is having ‘enough to buy’. But our Government can also create capacity to that there is enough to supply what is required.
We must not accept the Neoliberal falsehoods, and always challenge those that say ‘there isn’t enough money’. In truth the Government has chosen to not supply the required investment.
UPDATE: November 2023.
I’ve just met, and have been talking to, a UK based company that can make the Energy Hub part of the above work. They have the technology that enables those that generate energy in excess of their needs (either constantly or intermittently) to sell it to others near by that need energy (either constantly or intermittently). This Peer-to-Peer energy market leads to the energy producer (say the school) getting more that if they sold the surplus to the grid, and the users making savings compared with buying form the usual energy suppliers. I really like this idea and each Local Authority (or Industrial Estate owner) should have strategies in place to deliver this local energy market; not that individual firms and consumers need these two entities to enter the Peer-To-Peer Energy world; the people I met can ‘match-make’ and create such a local energy market.This really is quite exciting.
Regeneration X Blog 