The exemplar baseline design has been developed for a Primary school with 420 pupil places for ages 3 to 11, including a 26 FTE nursery.

The school and its Trust have an over-arching net zero carbon strategy for all its schools and see the new school building as an opportunity to confirm and extend their zero-carbon estate wide strategy and to provide a framework in which the school can develop their biophilic requirements and outdoor curriculum. They are a Trust which will work to achieve the best out of their building and are keen to develop new strategies.

Our component solution has undertaken Level 5 modelling to ensure compliance with Part L and Annex 2H. The school’s total annual energy consumption is predicted, to demonstrate compliance with the energy targets within Annex 2H. Energy consumption is minimised firstly by good passive design, minimising the need for energy for space heating and lighting, secondly by the use of low energy lighting and good lighting design, low carbon technologies and highly efficiency plant.

The school has been designed using the “Be lean, be Clean, Be Green” design principles to maximise passive solar gain & optimise daylight and the use of shading. Solar gain will be controlled to allow beneficial use in the heating season but not at the expense of overheating in the summer. The use of natural ventilation and hybrid ventilation has been maximised to reduce energy consumption.

To further reduce energy use we have improved the performance of the thermal envelope of the building by up to 43%. We have also incorporated tempered air into the class vent units to improve both efficiency and off-site modularisation and increased the efficiency of the LED lighting installation.

Our primary school component design has been accurately modelled using EDSL-TAS software to calculate the predicted energy use and energy benchmarks, which indicate a TER betterment of 11% and an energy target betterment of 29%. This has been achieved by adopting the enhanced U-Values and thermal specification.