Education and wellbeing should focus on people, and the best way to tackle that is to prioritise the needs and overcome the challenges that young people are facing today.

Focusing on two principal themes; Retrofit and Wellbeing, the panel prioritised a ‘people first’ over ‘fabric first’ approach to tackle the existing education estates.  

In the previous Education expert panel, the biggest obstacles posed by Retrofit and Wellbeing were understood as: Retrofit – how to refit existing educational facilities for the next generation and radically reduce carbon emissions; and Wellbeing - rethinking internal and external environments including the very topical issue of ventilation, improving air quality, giving better access to green and outdoor areas.

When the NLA panel chairs met recently, there was discussion about joining up the work of the panels towards the New London Agenda, and these two themes seemed to present a good opportunity to do so. 

For Retrofit we were joined by Ashley Bateson, Head of Sustainability at Hoare Lea and chair of the NLA Net Zero panel who briefed the panel on the best approaches to achieving net zero with existing education building stock; how consideration of whole life carbon is increasingly important as the grid rapidly decarbonises; and what key factors need to be considered: building form, envelope enhancements, heat pumps and a mixed-mode ventilation strategy. 

We discussed some of the many challenges, how a step change in thinking is required, and simply where to start with seemingly almost impossible targets. Examples were shared of historic buildings; needing more solar panels than a roof accommodates; and the consequences of switching to heat pumps from gas boilers. And what happens if all the available measures are still not enough to meet the necessary targets. 

We were also reminded that when looking at systems, charts and data - perhaps the inevitable focus of built environment professionals in energy use discussions - actually the need to focus on people. Climate change affects people from ethnically diverse backgrounds the most.

It was also noted that it was hard to talk about retrofit and carbon emissions without also talking about Wellbeing. Which brought us to our second, interlinked, theme.

We were joined by ventilation specialist Ian Palmer from Airflow, who is on the NLA Wellbeing panel. Ian presented some alarming statistics about the impact of poor ventilation on young people. This was borne out by anecdotal evidence from educational practitioners on the panel who are seeing more and more students afflicted by respiratory disorders. 

We looked at some examples of measures to improve ventilation and air quality, including one from Southwark where attempts have been made to improve external air quality and acoustics in an urban primary school playground through a perimeter barrier and extensive planting. There was a desire to see the GLA promote through policy more green structures and spaces in and around educational buildings. The microclimate created by green landscaping delivers cooler air which brings multiple benefits. 

And once again, we were brought back to focus on people. Young people’s health has suffered during the pandemic due to a lack of wellbeing. There was plea for decision-makers to actually spend time in classrooms to better understand the challenges young people face. With that in mind, for our next and final meeting (which will be our first in-person!) for this cycle of NLA Expert Panels, we will be aiming to draw our work towards a series of initial policy recommendations that will inform the New London Agenda.