Teachers becoming “crash-test dummies”

27 January 2009

The government’s £45 billion Building Schools for the Future programme is “turning head teachers into crash-test dummies for renewable technology”. That’s according to Roderic Bunn from the Building Services Research and Information Association, speaking on Radio 4’s Costing the Earth programme last night.

“Renewable technologies are quite fragile, particularly if they are not fine tuned after occupation. We should not be foisting this sort of technology onto school caretakers,” he said.

A spokesman for Cabe, the government’s architecture, agreed. “On the drawing board the schools are green and low carbon but because of the obsession with ‘eco-bling’ they fail to be green operationally.” Some of the eco-technology is difficult to operate, he added. “It should be fit and forget and shouldn’t need constant nannying. Green ratings encourage the use of more green features such as photo-voltaic panels but in practice this is nuisance technology.”

The BSF Programme aims to make all its new buildings zero carbon by 2016.
But Adrian Lehman head of the Usable Buildings Trust, argued the first schools to be built are not meeting their design aspirations, and often use two to three times more energy than predicted. He said this is due to a misplaced belief that by installing green features in schools, such as biomass boilers, solar panels and wind turbines, the buildings will use less energy, whereas the opposite is often occurring.

“For schools to be suitable places to learn we need to dump the ‘eco bling’. Things like night time cooling are very important but they are also very boring. You don’t need flashy design statements you just need boring things that work properly.”

Bunn added that research he’d completed revealed that one of the top sustainable BSF schools was only narrowly beating a Victorian primary school in terms of its operational energy consumption.

In some cases the programme was even jeopardising pupils’ learning. Hameldon Community College, a BSF school, failed its Ofsted Report in 2007 and was put into special measures. The school was judged on 26 factors and was awarded the lowest possible grade four - exceptionally low' - in 19 of them – part of the reason was that building work disrupted classes and added to teachers’ workloads.

The analysts’ comments were backed up by the experience of some of the head teachers and site managers interviewed for the programme. One site manager from Solihull said that starting work at his BSF school has been “a baptism of fire”. The initial training should have been followed up with more, he said. “The high technology nature of the place is a problem. Most site mangers wouldn’t have a clue what to do.”

But the BSF programme is meeting one of its targets –to encourage pupils to understand climate change. Pupils in environmentally-friendly schools are encouraged to recycle more at school and take these lessons home. Yet one head teacher of a Bristol academy said they were missing opportunities not integrating the way the school was managed and run into the national curriculum.