Ben Harding EPQ - are British secondary schools really environmentally sustainable?

After 7 months of starting my project, I feel it is now time for a review of the progress of my project. From my original idea of researching about sustainability in schools I have found that it is more accurate to research sustainability in British secondary schools. From this, I have found government advice documents published by the department for education. Also, from this I have found many articles from private organisations and charities as well as multiple case studies. I have also considered many forms of primary research. In the past I have planned to carry out an interview with the school business manager as well as emailing all the other schools in our school trust to enquire about the display energy certificates and date of construction. After getting only 3 replied out of 9, I decided to email again and ask for the year of construction as I was previously directed to the governments online DEC finder. At the moment, after coming back from Easter half term, I only received ...

 Below are a set of questions that I was given the opportunity to ask an architect to help me to expand my knowledge and gain a better understanding of how an issue such as architectural design plays a role in the sustainability level of schools. Have you ever been involved in the building of a sustainable school? Not a school but Higher Education buildings   If so, what would be some characteristics of sustainable schools? Passive design which is about orientation and controlling window opening size so that give daylight without too much unwanted solar gain. Air tightness [THS1]   is vital to minimise energy use – to do this simple shapes and volumes are generally better because they allow the junctions between elements to be built to a good standard on site. Avoiding heating the building with gas / fossil fuel / biomass due to carbon. Instead looking for alterabtive heat source such as using using ground or source heat pumps. In the future the electrical gri...

  These photos are taken from a display board in our school outlining some of the data collected regarding waste disposal. This data is a clear indicator of the waste collected from this school over the February 2022 period. This data is useful as it does give data for our school as an individual, however some of the data refers to Derby schools, which may still be useful in my project, but limit the reliability when considering our school individually.                                       Some of the above data uses abbreviations. The abbreviations used are as follows... EfW- energy from waste RDF- refuse derived fuel Mrf- materials recovery facility