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Is an opportunity to create a culture of environmental sustainability in our schools and communities being lost? And what role might digital technologies play in this agenda?

With the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme now well underway, the environmental sustainability of our existing, and planned, school buildings is increasingly coming under scrutiny. But the challenge is not just how to meet sustainability objectives such as energy efficiency and low carbon footprints. The real challenge is to design, build, test and maintain schools that integrate environmental sustainability into the very fabric of the school, to enhance the curriculum and to deliver what teachers and children need.

For some analysts, a radical reappraisal of the whole process, with its flawed focus on unmeasured inputs such as biomass boilers, photo-voltaic panels and ICT equipment rather than on outcomes, would result in more effective sustainability approaches. But others go further, and insist that sustainability needs to start with a consideration of how the learners might benefit.

White Design is an award-winning architectural practice and consultancy specialising in sustainable buildings, including eco-schools and other learning spaces. Director Craig White explains how a new approach can provide radical educational change:

“We don’t ask questions about the architecture or the technology of a new school building. We start with the child and then work back from there so that the product is a building fit for education.”

White believes that the task for sustainable school design is for every subject to have an immediate or second-tier link to the environment pupils are in, by recognising that physical structure and systems (heating, light, ventilation, water etc) are intrinsic to the education experienced by children. School buildings and the pupils should communicate with each other.

He also flags up some difficulties specifically around the way that ICTs are commissioned in the design process:

“One issue is that ICT is not often part of the design agenda because it is commissioned separately, like furniture… we aim to influence the ICT brief as far as possible, drawing on our specialised knowledge of making buildings into tools for learning in their own right.”

To offer an alternative approach that really integrates the environmental agenda with the educational agenda through the use of ICTs, White draws on his company’s experience in designing new schools:

“We build middleware so that pupils can log into the school system to access the technical data. They will see how much heat is being generated, how much water is being used and from what points, the carbon emissions that the school is creating, where the lights are on and off and so on. All the information they access is curriculum-friendly and the software they use interprets the basic data so that it is understandable for a 6 or 16 year-old.

“The school now becomes a vehicle rather than a container for education. We can then map the building and its information to the government’s Eight Doorways to Sustainability.”

The aim is to provide hooks into the school’s systems for learners and teachers to engage with. For example, the system could show that 7,000 litres of rainwater has been collected this month via an LED read-out in the foyer. This basic data can be translated to show how many raindrops there are in 7,000 litres and, from there, how many raindrops it takes to flush a toilet. The ‘lifecycle’ of that water can be mapped from clouds to rivers to seas. It can be linked to the carbon emissions created. Lessons can be learned from the value different countries place on water, from the European perspective and from countries where water access is scarce.

The school’s systems can thus provide a source of information directly relevant to teaching and learning, which provides rich opportunities for the student.

So will this vision of ICT as an important tool for promoting the sustainability of schools and their wider communities become a reality? The Education and Skills Committee warned in its report ‘Sustainable Schools: Are we building schools for the future?’ that a lack of confidence and clear direction from government could lead to ICT failing to act as a means by which educational and environmental transformation can be achieved through the BSF programme.

Roderic Bunn, analyst at the Building Services Research Industrial Association (BSRIA) agrees that a unique opportunity could be lost. He believes that if the technologies employed are appropriate and easy to manage, then the pupils can be empowered to learn and contribute to the sustainability of their school: “The best caretakers in schools are the kids. In maintenance and manageability, they make a huge difference.”

At the moment, however, he thinks that we are not exploring this possibility, as the design of sustainable technologies and their controls are too often too complex.

“You mustn’t sell dreams and install nightmares. Design is too often ‘fit and forget’. It should be ‘fit and manage’ with much more careful proving of technology. The technologies are not properly commissioned and not properly mapped to schools’ needs. There are really bad user controls, which are very complex and often not labelled. Users may have no idea how they work.”

There is a danger that under the banner of sustainability, schools will lose control of the technology as it becomes too complex to manage without proper training. There is very little evidence-based design going on, with the focus on inputs – technologies like photo-voltaic panels and wind turbines. What’s needed is focus on outcomes. Are solar-powered and solar-tracking shading systems, for example, too complex for a primary school to manage and gain educational value?

The challenge is how to give young people the toolkits and the responsibility to link together creative, information and knowledge applications. Learners should be in control of the ICT they use; software should be invisible and outcomes-driven, allowing users to build new links between applications and data without the need to write complex code.

But ICT structural management is only part of the wider context in which a culture of sustainability is reinforced through the transformation of school buildings into a knowledge resource for learners.

Cassop Primary School in County Durham, winner of the DCSF Award for Sustainable Schools in the National Teaching Awards, serves two former coalmining villages and has been working to become carbon neutral since 1999, with the installation of a wind turbine, solar panels and a biomass boiler to power the school building, and wide-ranging energy efficiency measures. The school is a brick building built around 1912, with the interior completely refurbished in 1972.

Headteacher Jim McManners and his staff integrate education for sustainable development into all school work. Through partnerships and grants, they have developed a school that displays and uses all forms of renewable energy. Pupils – the Green Team - are at the forefront of the campaign, as ‘energy monitors’ and knowledgeable guides for visitors, including linked schools in Europe and Africa.

McManners says: “It isn’t sufficient to act locally. We need to address global issues and find routes to influence others. To do that responsibly we needed more than a prophecy of despair and alarm. The wind turbine and other equipment offer us a positive route to education on sustainability.”

The school has set up a sustainability centre for pupils and visiting groups of all ages. The aim is to make connections between the quality of the environment and people’s actions, while providing the opportunity to discuss global issues and potential solutions. The centre gives children a chance to learn through firsthand experiences and for other groups to make use of facilities. They learn how the wind turbine works and why it is installed, which also leads to discussions on other ways to make energy. Children can also make and test small turbines in the centre’s wind tunnel as well as constructing tiny photo-voltaic cells.

Groups can also see and discuss the heating system that uses recycled waste wood, viewing the whole process from planting to boiler house. Visiting the nearby landfill site to see what happens to rubbish prompts discussion on producing methane-fuelled electricity, recycling and ways to reduce waste. Visitors can also see school fuel being made from rubbish, and use a glass recycling simulator.

Woodheys Primary School in Sale, Cheshire is another example of award-winning, inclusive sustainability. Freda Eyden, the school’s Environmental Projects Coordinator, says that the ecological agenda is at the heart of the curriculum but extends far beyond the school gates. Among many other eco-friendly tasks, the children monitor energy use and teams check daily for wastage in the building. Updated ICT kit has reduced electricity consumption.

Eyden works with other teaching staff to ensure that the knowledge children acquire in their practical sustainability routines feeds back into most subject areas and helps to focus on wider, global issues such as carbon emissions, resource management, recycling and renewable energy sources.

“Feedback from families shows that what the children learn goes beyond the school gates. We are making sustainable life the ethos of the school by living it as well as teaching it through the curriculum,” she says.

This evolution of the school’s role as an educational hub at the heart of a community requires that it extends beyond the buildings, allowing access to its knowledge resources ‘anytime, anywhere’ and for the greatest number of people. A variety of devices and networks can help to create conditions for sustainable community involvement and inclusion.

Handheld devices (PDAs and high-specification mobile phones) could provide the means to cut equipment costs, reduce energy use and, just as importantly, help to effect a transformation in the geography of learning. With these devices, pupils can acquire knowledge and skills in a variety of settings, both real and virtual. The devices can access and interact with information in the formal school environment as well as in the community and at home.

Going further, young people can use these devices to personalise the way they learn, blending their knowledge of community software, blogs, wikis, messaging and so on, with formal curriculum structures to recreate and own their learning experience.

Established schools can transform their structures through the use of wireless networks with portable devices that can free a wider range of spaces for learning, extending beyond the physical building into the surrounding landscape.

However and wherever technology is used to contribute to achieving the vision of sustainable schools, questions still remain on whether the current guidelines and benchmarks in place are adequate. A sustainable school is not just a building that meets current green standards. It has to be a sentient structure that interacts with learners and gives them the opportunity to acquire new knowledge and skills. Learners should also have a degree of control over the school’s technologies so that they can measure, adjust and transform their environment. But most importantly, schools can become the means to transmit sustainable living messages out to the wide community, and this is an opportunity that should not be missed.

Links

Cassop Primary School: www.cassopschool.org.uk
Woodheys Primary School: www.woodheys.trafford.sch.uk

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