Joe Nutt, senior education specialist at RM, remembers standing next to the first BSF school to be built: "I said to the architect: 'How much of this is recyclable?' and he said, 'None of it'." That was three years ago. It is now widely agreed that the first wave of BSF was a missed opportunity when it comes to sustainability. As Mairi Johnson, interim head of enabling at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), puts it: "Four years ago sustainability wasn't on the agenda at all."
The picture today looks very different. Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, has announced a target stating that by 2016 all secondary schools should be "zero carbon" (that is, have zero net emissions), and should meet the Breeam (BRE Environmental Assessment Method) sustainability standard of "very good". To help schools meet the standards, the government is providing an extra £110m for 220 schools being rebuilt in waves four, five and six of BSF.
How realistic is the zero carbon target? The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) itself acknowledges that with current technology, the cost of creating completely zero carbon schools is prohibitively expensive, and it is setting up a taskforce of experts who will, over the next 18 months, come up with recommendations about how it can be achieved.
Johnson agrees that it's a demanding target, but adds that cutting emissions by 80% is "reasonably achievable". "You can get a long way towards that by how you place the building on the site in relation to the sun and the wind. You can insulate the building so that it's got low requirements for heating, and get the natural daylight right so that you don't have to turn lights on all the time. But when it comes to the last 20%, then you're looking at things that are quite expensive, such as solar panels, and the payback is very long, possibly longer than the lifetime of the building."
Bideford college in Devon is one of three schools selected by the DCSF to meet the Breeam "excellent" rating. The plan is that these schools will either be carbon-neutral, or nearly carbon-neutral, and will be used by the government as exemplars of sustainability.
Work at Bideford has just begun, and should be completed by Easter 2010. Sustainability will be built into every aspect of the school's design, says Mike Newby, the new college coordinator. It will take a two-pronged approach of using renewable energy sources — wind turbines and a biomass boiler — and minimising the amount of energy it uses during the school day. Artful use of glass means that artificial light will be used sparingly, while the need for heating will be reduced by good insulation and the use of concrete slabs to absorb and radiate heat, says Newby. "During the day,when it's hot, the concrete slab absorbs the heat and then in the night-time, as the air temperature cools, it releases the heat back in and keeps the air temperature in those rooms more stable." A water management system will minimise waste, while a sedum roof — a waterproof, well-insulated roof covered in plants — will allow the school to reuse rainwater.
Energy-hungry
The big challenge for Bideford, as for other BSF schools, is going to be in the use of ICT. Interactive whiteboards are used throughout the school system, and are "very energy-hungry", says Johnson, particularly if left on standby. Desktop and laptop PCs both use power, while server rooms need to be kept cool, often by airconditioning. ICT suppliers are now working closely with architects and builders to map out power consumption in the new buildings, says Nutt.
Like many other schools, Bideford is planning to use thin clients (connected to a server and without their own hard disc) rather than PCs or laptops. Such devices, says Rajesh Sinha, technical director of ICT systems supplier Bailey Teswaine, consume only 10% of the electricity a PC would use. Bailey Teswaine is looking at solutions such as more energy-efficient servers, and naturally-ventilated rather than air-conditioned data centres. It also offers a managed hosting service for schools, so that the energy burden is borne centrally rather than by individual schools.
The new drive towards sustainability marks a major change of direction after a poor start for BSF, and there is a real desire to make it happen among those working on the projects, says Nutt. "The builders are very alert to recycling what they can. That's changed quite dramatically."
