Next generation schools

All new schools must align with the UK government’s commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050. To meet this challenge, the Department for Education asked our experts to lead the GenZero project developing prototypes for offsite constructed net-zero schools. Heading a team of 13 organisations – and building on our work creating standardised designs for the Priority School Building Programme – we developed a platform system enabling every new school to be built from a kit of standardised components. The new schools will be net-negative in carbon emissions, thanks to the use of carbon-capturing timber as the primary material. The designs also offer resilience to anticipated global warming, with cooling achieved through passive cross-ventilation, and the components are designed to achieve outstanding noise and thermal insulation. The platform is digital, so virtual objects representing components can be selected and placed within a school design, then the schedule of manufacture and delivery automatically generated. The system allows six standard sizes of secondary school, but because each size can be configured differently our standard kit provides 72 different standard school types, with further variations possible. “We needed a standardised, replicable layout that could be constructed from the same pieces, used in different ways, to meet the diverse needs and site constraints of many different schools,” says our lead project manager for the programme, Andrew Williamson. “It’s like creating a jigsaw; we needed to know what the final picture would look like in order to create the pieces and put them back together.”