Building a Sustainable Future

Students engaged in a ground-breaking programme designed to bring education and industry together could be the architects of a sustainable future for all. Mark Smith, Director at Stephen George + Partners explains how high school students are being immersed in architectural practice.

Earlier this year, I was honoured to see Year 9 students from St Mary’s and St John’s Church of England school in Barnet (SMSJ) receive certificates and prizes for a raft of innovative ideas for planet-friendly homes that included solar and hydroelectric power, heat pumps, and waste management. The students had just completed ‘Architecture and Sustainability – looking to the future’, an innovative schools programme designed to engage with future generations in planning the environmentally friendly homes and towns of their own future.

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      string(371) "... a kitchen in 1915, comparedto kitchens today. They then design a kitchen for the future,balancing the pros and cons of futuristic materials suchas biopolymers, sustainable wood composites and eventable salt, which could be used as detergent in ultrasounddishwashers. The aim is to create a stylish but sustainable andinexpensive kitchen ..."
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      string(5651) "Stages 1-4Mapping Worlds(show.mappingworlds.com/world) Key Stage 3-4http://www.amnesty.org.ukhttp://show.mappingworlds.com/worlde-learning76Volume5.4nCreativeTeaching&LearningDeveloped by the Department for Education, the RenewableWorld project revolves around a series of connected butself-contained web activities, which explore the diversity ofrenewable materials and their role in building a sustainablefuture. The activities are simple and informative, and youcan find a list of curricular links and also prompts for furtherdiscussion and activities in the teachers’ section of the site.There are five activities in total, covering a range of topicsrelated to renewability, including careers in the renewablematerials industry, and the importance of us as consumers inchoosing renewable alternatives. They all have far-reachingpotential for the classroom – for example, activity 1, a sortinggame in which players identify renewable and non-renewabletextiles, fuels and building materials, could provide anengaging springboard into the topic. Activities 4 and 5, onthe other hand, may be a useful way to end an explorationof renewability, as their aim is to stimulate discussion andself-reflection. Activity 5, for example, asks pupils to considerimportant questions, such as whether we should forcepeople to switch to renewables, or whether the advantagesof renewable materials outweigh the drawbacks. Pupils thencome up to the board and vote yes or no by clicking on thedecision line. Individual votes are anonymous, but the systemprovides a bar chart overview at the end.If you’re searching for a more structured activity, however,then activity 2 is definitely worth a look. Here, pupils explorethe materials used to furnish a kitchen in 1915, comparedto kitchens today. They then design a kitchen for the future,balancing the pros and cons of futuristic materials suchas biopolymers, sustainable wood composites and eventable salt, which could be used as detergent in ultrasounddishwashers. The aim is to create a stylish but sustainable andinexpensive kitchen – a tall order! For extension tasks relatedto this activity, see ‘Quick Ideas’ in the teachers’ section.Vibrant, colourful and wonderfully illustrated, this interactivecityscape is a fantastic way to investigate how people canreduce waste, use less energy and save money by doingsimple things at home, at work and in the community.The city map is divided into four neighbourhoods, all ofwhich contain a range of different characters to meet, andbuildings and businesses to explore. Pupils can bouncebetween Shaq’s Garage, Maria’s Market, City Hall, the HazardousWaste Centre, even the old noxious landfill site from when thecity was not so green and known as ‘Dumptown’, in order tolearn how the 3Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle – can be appliedto different aspects of life.The site is intuitive and easy to use, and the informationit provides is humorous and expressed in very child-friendlyterms. There’s quite a lot of text in places, so younger childrenmay need some support, although they will enjoy clickingaround to find all the hidden pop ups in each image.The focus is on communities banding together, and thereare plenty of ideas that pupils can carry out in their ownhomes, in schools and around the neighbourhood. Why notvisit Recycle City school and see what initiatives you andyour students can put into practice in your own classroom?The site also suggests organising a virtual scavenger hunt– for example, asking your pupils to work in groups to findsomething made from recycled tires, or perhaps a use for oldbricks. Of course, the list of items you’d like your pupils to findcan be tailored to emphasise reuse, recycling, or any othertopic you are exploring in class.Another suggested activity for a classroom setting is theClean Up Dumptown game, which gives you the chancewitness Recycle City at its worst. Here, pupils take on the roleof city manager and put into place a number of initiatives toreduce waste. The game is very open-ended, with no goalsor winning conditions at all. This allows teachers to assigngoals as they wish, perhaps setting an overall spending limitin order to emphasise the balance between cost and impact.Recycle City(www3.epa.gov/recyclecity) Key Stages 2-3The Renewable World(www.renewableworld.org.uk) Key Stages 2-4http://www3.epa.gov/recyclecityhttp://www.renewableworld.org.uk/Volume5.4nCreativeTeaching&Learning77e-learningBased on a pop-up book of the same name, How We MakeStuff explains how the earth’s natural resources are used tomake everyday objects such as mobile phones, chocolateand rubber ducks. Each item’s journey is condensed into nomore than six steps – complete with lovely illustrations andfascinating facts – which outline its story from raw material tofinished product, plus how we dispose with it once we’re done.The final step is a question: can we do things differently? Thisallows children to explore the different, more environmentallyfriendly approaches we could take to designing and creatingproducts, as well as inventive ways to recycle and reuse suchitems – for example, making trainers that can be turned intosoil, or printing books on plastic that can be washed andreused.The site also features a fantastic section on biomimicry.Nature manages to turn production and disposal into anendless loop: why can’t we? Highlights here include: a brilliantvideo on what we can learn about economy from ants andtermites, another on what a tree can teach us about plumbing,and a short slideshow featuring"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Websites For Ethical Living

23 Jul 2015

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      string(5713) "courtyard is an open space of some 100m diameter that includes a 150 seat performance space. This provides a secure internal focus for the occupants of the school that is separate from the parts that are open to the public. The security of the school is further maintained by using sophisticated access control beyond the reception area, with identity cards for regular users.The structure of the building included a mixture of concrete, steel and wooden elements to achieve the ideal blend of cost, speed and sustainability. The roof is reinforced concrete using welded fabric rather than loose-laid bars. This was a quicker construction than other methods and provided a cost-competitive alternative to a lightweight roof. The greater thermal mass is a requirement to store daytime heat gains to prevent overheating of the classrooms.Off-site fabrication of concrete panels and wall elements meant that on-site construction was very quick and the standardised sizes allowed for great flexibility in design. The curtain walling and the pre-cast cladding were designed to the same dimensions and therefore window placement was highly flexible. These elements were pre-fabricated off-site and this enabled on-site construction to be completed in less than a year.To meet the challenging carbon foot print performance criteria biomass boilers were used, with the wood chip fuel sourced from local suppliers. The school heating system has an output of approximately 2MW. This is provided from a mixture of gas-fired condensing boilers serving underfloor heating throughout the building and a biomass fuelled boiler of 320kW that also serves the constant temperature requirements. The biomass boiler provides the bulk of the heating for the base-load requirements, and this is essential in order to provide the very low carbon design target for the school and the swimming pool. This type of operation regime is of course ideally suited to biomass boilers. The wood chip fuel is from local short rotation coppice and is stored locally in a bunker. Regular deliveries of the wood chip are required but these were allowed for in the design of the storage and access routes.The ventilation strategy for the school was developed from the computer simulations and required the exposed thermal mass of the building, and the roof in particular, to work together with the ventilation to avoid overheating. The automatically controlled windows work to increase night time ventilation which uses the cool night air to remove heat from the fabric of the building. The result is a cool school for the start of the next day’s teaching. The ventilation design had to be mindful of the requirements of Building Bulletin 93 and the acoustic performance of the school, because a railway line ran along the periphery of the school grounds. Careful location of windows and the construction of a 5m high noise barrier ensured that intrusive railway noise would not be a problem.To further reduce the environmental impact, a rainwater harvesting scheme was installed to provide water for flushing toilets and irrigation of planting. Rainwater harvesting was needed to meet the design specification which was significantly better than the water use of a typical school. The rainwater from the roofs is collected and stored in four 50,000 litre tanks. It is used for flushing toilets and irrigating the planting of the site. The tanks are located underground and this rather unusual choice was a result of the size of the tanks needed on this site. The normal installation at roof level was not an option.In January 2007, the school came into operation and it certainly is a prime example of a learning centre to be designed as highly sustainable and indeed it has won numerous awards for its design. However, it is valid to ask if this design intention will be carried through into actual performance. These sustainable design solutions nearly always work at 100% on the drawing board or computer program. What is needed is a concerted effort to establish that they will work in practice and do so long into the future. A recent report, ‘Building for the Future: Sustainable Construction and Refurbishment on the Government Estate’ has been published by the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts. It deals with the sustainable credentials of work on buildings in the Government estate which in recent times has required a BREEAM excellent standard. To quote from the overview of the report:“ Despite the attention given to targets and mandatory practices to deliver sustainability, much remains to be done if departments and agencies are to achieve key targets set out in the Common Minimum Standards. Mandatory environmental (BREEAM or equivalent) assessments were carried out in just 35% of new build projects and 18% of major refurbishment projects during 2005-06. The required environmental standards could be shown to have been met in only 9% of projects. The NAO’s own assessment of a sample of projects in 2005-06 found that many projects fell short of the required standards. The take-up of Quick Wins was also limited, despite being mandatory since 2003. Departments often did not conduct post-occupancy evaluations, though these are a well-recognised tool for improving building design and operation, and also a requirement of OGC’s Gateway Review process”Whilst this requirement has not been extended to school buildings we should take the message to heart. If we do not follow-up the design with a real evaluation of its performance in practice we will not have an accurate picture of how"
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ECO Friendly Design

Five Easy Lessons For Sustainability

7 Jun 2021

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      string(339) "... with Burnley, Pop-Up is working inconjunction with Start (an initiative of The Princeof Wales to show people how simple steps can leadto a more sustainable future), The Prince’s Charities(especially BITC), the council and, of course, the 38primary schools of Burnley.  The focus of this primaryschool project is ..."
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      string(5622) "SpacesSustainabilitywww.teachingtimes.commake a big difference, so that we change our habitsand behaviour and tread more gently on the planet.What is Pop-Up?Pop-Up-Farm brings sustainability education intoschools and the wider community, both in the UK andoverseas.  It combines the basic elements of water,waste, energy, food and growing to demonstratedifferent ways people can change their lives to themutual benefit of communities and the planet.The heart of the Pop-Up farm is the Plotting Shed.This can be an existing physical structure, a real shedor any other building deemed suitable.  The otherelements of the Pop-Up farm will lead out from theshed.  In the shed will be cushions and bean-bags(or chairs), boards and chalk, paper and pens –Thepurpose of the plotting shed is to encourage peopleto share ideas, suggestions and thoughts. The seriesof images accompanying this article illustrate boththe concept of the Pop Up initiative.How does Pop-Up work?Pop-Up will focus on three key areas:Schools – primary and secondaryCommunities – churches,  town squares,supermarket car-parksInternational – Commonwealth countries, bothdeveloped and developing.SchoolsStarting with Burnley, Pop-Up is working inconjunction with Start (an initiative of The Princeof Wales to show people how simple steps can leadto a more sustainable future), The Prince’s Charities(especially BITC), the council and, of course, the 38primary schools of Burnley.  The focus of this primaryschool project is to educate children on the basicsof sustainability in a fun and engaging manner.  Asa key partner of Start, Asda will be at the heart of theproject supporting Pop-Up with sheds, water butts,tools and other inputs as required.CommunitiesStarting with Manchester, Pop-Up is planning to workin conjunction with the city council, to introduce aPop-Up presence in the heart of the city, focusingon the employment elements of sustainability byestablishing a commercially operating seasonalfarm, whilst demonstrating and educating peopleon how they can not only save money, but alsoenhance their lives by adopting a more sustainableapproach to life.InternationalStarting with Uganda, Pop-Up is working inconjunction with Seeds for Development (a charity■■■for providing people with the types of solutionsthat they require. In particular, they challenge themyth of sustainability and that industrialised viewof nature and people not mixing. In growing in theurban space, and establishing a new paradigm forthat growing and including learning as a centralfeature of the work in progress, we begin to see theprospect of a new form of urban life, based aroundday-to-day capabilities, not some utopian design buta curriculum for life, and of life.Schools in the vanguard of changeBy taking the environmentalism out of the urbanmix, the experimental projects are starting to getbeyond the implausibility of ‘nature as happy, greenand friendly’, to a simple practical relationship ofconvenience. This takes us out of the predictableframeworks through the integration of urban andrural by bringing a new form of learning to thetownscape. It has to be noted that this also has little todo with generating ‘local’ produce, which perpetuatesa particular form of market-trading promoting elitefoods, distinct from all other foods. Instead, bygrowing food inside city space experiments with theurban idea, it represents a way of responding to thefood security crisis, first symbolically, and perhaps ata later stage, as an embedded feature of the urbanlandscape and mindscape.That is why the potential gains of using schoolyardsas the new urban farm are so attractive, as theyconnect a number of important elements together.School is a point of contact for a community ofpeople. There is a shared interest in making thelearning context real and provocative and purposefulfor the participants involved. There is great interestin how we might ensure that school has relevanceto young people, and the existing fragmentation ofenterprise and education can be overcome as theproduce arising from the schemes can be developedcommercially, thereby enabling further projects to befunded without needing to be externally funded.A school of sustainabilitySo I think that the school of sustainability is nota school at all in the traditional sense. Instead itrepresents the attitude of sustainability in practice, away of providing a design through which communityfood security can being to become a feature of a newcurriculum for urban life. This would be a curriculumthat sees growing, and experimentation of growingin the urban setting, as part of a vast, urban open-source programme.To achieve this I have designed a project called‘Pop-Up- Farm’ to illustrate this school of sustainabilityin action. The basic idea is that Pop-Up challengesus in unexpected ways and in unexpected places,showing us how easy it is to make little changes that 14 Learning Spaces  Volume 1:2Sustainabilitywww.teachingtimes.comsupporting Ugandan farmers) in 4 schools, whichalso play an important role within their communities.Pop-Up will demonstrate basic farming techniquesto children and local farmers/residents and highlightthe importance of water harvesting, soil managementand creating viable community held businesses.SummaryIn his Reith Lectures of 1995, Cities for a small planet,Richard Rodgers presented some startling data thatillustrated the effect that the car had made to theurban designed space. ‘An efficient parking standardrequires twenty square meters for a single car. Evensupposing that only one in five"
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Learning Spaces

LS1.2_p08-p14_Sustainable minds sustainable schools

3 Feb 2012

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      string(5166) "Steve suggested to me, wedo have a choice. We can continue business as usual orwe can seek new solutions and approaches to extendand challenge what we have been doing so far to try toprevent ecological collapse.So what exactly has this all got to do with theprofessional learning of educators?■■■ School Leaders pioneering newapproachesIn a recent project with The National College for SchoolLeadership (now renamed The National College) thatI have been involved in, we are seeing how schools arepart of this turning; for a change too is going to beneeded in the ways we educate, not just our childrenbut ourselves and our communities. If ‘The GreatTurning’ is to happen as fast and as effectively as weneed it to, then we need to move from being a societythat is still predominantly running on an industrialmindset to one that can serve the transition to a moreecological and sustainable world. The shift to a futurethat is ecologically sustainable is more profound andultimately more exciting than just technical fixes. Themost critical solutions are going to be educational onesand lie in changing existing mental models of who weare, the relationship we have with each other and aboveall with our places and the biosphere that sustains us.Building sustainable communities is a questionprimarily of renewing and re ordering our relationships.This change is essentially a question of learning,unlearning and re-learning. It is a question therefore ofwhat happens in classrooms and schools. Generationsof children have gone through a school system designedto take them away from the land and in making themliterate in one way but depriving them of a fundamentalliteracy in another way.The recently published Thinkpiece from NCSL(Birney et al 2009) makes it clear that the decisionsabout how we want the future to be and our part increating that with children and young people is a moralone. It is an issue for everyone but particularly foreducational professionals. If we continue to subscribeto unsustainable practices such as pollution and over useof resources in the way we live and the ways in whichwe educate then we are potentially destroying the life-chances of our young people. The Thinkpiece goes soSchools in Ecological Transition: Education as if the future really mattered ■20………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….far as to say that we are as educational professionals, thedirect representatives of tomorrow’s generation. The wayforward, it suggests, is for us to aspire to a time whenschools become microcosms of the world as it needs tobe in the next decades. This includes:■ Providing living examples of sustainability practice■ Achieving self-sufficiency in energy and zero waste■ Growing as much food as possible■ Bringing the natural world back into the schoolsand its groundsThe National College’s ‘Sustainable Schools’ project(NCSL, 2009) has been working with leaders who arealready on the path of leading this change of focus fortheir schools. We have been asking ourselves as a projectteam; so just what is this change? How does it happenin a school? How do we sustain it and get everyoneinvolved? In the social change literature leaders whoare starting out on the journey of creating a sustainablecommunity in their school and local community areoften termed ‘early adopters’. What they are doing iscreating a broader view of outcomes for their schoolsand a particular approach to the nurture, cultivationand re- prioritising of relationships as an educationalgoal; however these relationships are not confined tohuman ones, critical as those are. Leading a school froman ecological perspective sets the stage for a larger set ofrelationships to become a central concern of educationand the curriculum.What becomes important is the relationship studentshave to energy, to water, to waste, to growing food,to the outdoors and the local eco–systems of whichthey are a part; also to the community they belong to;learning about the inter-relatedness between people,their community and the ecological processes thatlife relies on. This is not by any means a theoreticalexploration. It has the purpose of clarifying how to livefrom the understanding of these inter-connections; anunderstanding that leads to new insight about peopletheir place and their purpose. (NCSL, 2009.)Until now ecology, place-based learning and thestudy of human habitats have taken place in geography,science and environmental studies programmes.However a focus on sustainability is rapidly becomingsuch a priority that there is a need for all the adultsin a school and all the subjects of the curriculum tohave a role and contribution for this is truly a wholecommunity initiative.There are new and exciting pedagogies beginningto emerge"
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Professional Development

Education as if the future really mattered

22 Jul 2010

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