Advancing School Performance: Indoor environmental quality, Resilience and Educational outcomes (ASPIRE)

尽管英国有1000万儿童一生中30%的时间是在学校度过的，其中大约70%的时间是在教室里度过的，但迄今为止，人们对教室室内环境质量的建筑设计决定因素知之甚少。然而，有大量证据表明，室内空气质量差和室内温度过高会对学生的学习成绩和健康产生不利影响，尤其是哮喘，给国家卫生服务带来沉重负担。当我们考虑到儿童身体对室内环境危害的脆弱性增加时，这一点尤为重要：儿童比成人呼吸更多的室内空气污染物，他们的体温调节能力有限，他们的免疫系统仍在发育中。与此同时，学校建筑的碳排放量占英国公共部门总碳排放量的15%，而与供暖、制冷、照明和电器相关的能源成本占学校预算的很大一部分。因此，学校建筑行业可以在英国向低碳建筑转型的过程中发挥关键作用。英国的政策制定者、建筑设计师、学校管理者、教育工作者和家长都认识到创造健康和低碳学校环境的重要性，但他们需要工具和机制来确定实现这些目标的最佳策略。确保我们学校建筑的高室内环境质量，同时满足紧迫的碳减排目标，是英国建筑行业的一个紧迫的研究重点和主要的工程挑战。解决这一问题不仅有助于实现政府的2018年工业战略清洁增长目标，还有助于满足国家保护社会中最弱势群体、提高教育程度和减少卫生不平等的战略需求。为了应对这一挑战，跨学科项目ASPIRE旨在解决一个关键的知识鸿沟：学校建筑能否在保持高室内环境质量的同时实现低碳排放，从而促进学习和健康？我们的工作将首次汇集欧洲三项关于教室室内空气质量和温度的影响以及温带气候下学童的学习和健康的最大研究。他们的新颖、系统的共同分析将在广泛的教育环境中建立室内空气污染物暴露、温度和通风率与认知表现和健康症状之间的关系。我们将分析教育部的数据来构建一个学校建筑原型库，这些原型库在统计上代表了英国的学校建筑存量。原型描述将包括室内布局和建筑织物特性等细节，并将用于模拟当前和未来气候下低碳建筑设计和运营策略下每个原型的能源、热和室内空气质量性能。这些方案将通过与政府、公共卫生机构、建筑行业和学校社区的利益相关者在广泛的、有组织的研讨会上的双向沟通共同创建，这些研讨会是ASPIRE项目的一个组成部分。通过系统分析现有现场数据和模拟室内空气污染和温度暴露水平所建立的关系，我们将在国家层面上评估建筑节能设计和运营策略、占用和气候变化情景对教育程度和健康成本的影响。这个非常令人兴奋的新项目将为理解和提高低碳、健康学校建筑的整体性能铺平道路，并与我们的利益相关者密切合作，为制定有效的政策和最佳实践学校设计指导提供信息。

Despite the fact that 10 million children in the UK spend 30% of their life at school, around 70% of that time inside a classroom, the building design determinants of indoor environmental quality in classrooms are poorly understood to date. However, there is significant evidence that poor indoor air quality and exposure to excess indoor temperatures can have detrimental impacts on the learning performance and health of pupils, in particular asthma, placing a high burden on national health services. This is particularly important when we take into account the increased vulnerability of children's bodies to indoor environmental hazards: Children breathe more indoor air pollutants than adults for their size, have a limited ability to thermoregulate and their immune systems are still developing. School buildings are, in the meantime, responsible for 15% of the UK's total public sector carbon emissions, with energy costs associated with heating, cooling, lighting and appliances being a large portion of school budgets. The school building sector could, therefore, play a pivotal role in the UK's transition to a low carbon building stock. Policymakers, building designers, school managers, educators and parents in the UK recognise the importance of creating healthy and low carbon school environments but they need the tools and mechanisms to identify the best strategies to achieve them. Ensuring high indoor environmental quality in our school buildings whilst meeting pressing carbon emissions reduction targets is an urgent research priority and a major engineering challenge for the UK construction industry. Addressing it will not only help tackle the Government's 2018 Industrial Strategy Clean Growth targets but also help meet national strategic needs to protect the most vulnerable in society, increase educational attainment and reduce health inequities. As a response to this challenge, the interdisciplinary project ASPIRE aims to address a key knowledge gap: Can school buildings achieve low carbon emissions whilst maintaining high indoor environmental quality that enhances learning and health?Our work will bring together, for the first time, three of Europe's largest studies on the impact of classroom indoor air quality and temperature, and schoolchildren's learning and health in temperate climates. Their novel, systematic co-analysis will establish relationships between exposures to indoor air pollutants, temperatures and ventilation rates and cognitive performance and health symptoms for a wide range of educational settings.We will analyse Department for Education data to construct a library of school building archetypes that are statistically representative of the UK school building stock. The archetype descriptions will include details such as interior layouts and building fabric characteristics and will be used to simulate the energy, thermal and indoor air quality performance of each archetype under low carbon building design and operational strategies in the current and future climate. These scenarios will be co-created as a result of two-way communication with stakeholders from the government, public health bodies, the construction industry and school communities during extensive, structured workshops that form an integral part of the ASPIRE project. By using the relationships established during the systematic analysis of existing field data and the modelled indoor air pollution and temperature exposure levels, we will evaluate the impacts of building energy efficient design and operational strategies, occupancy and climate change scenarios on educational attainment, and health costs at the national level. This tremendously exciting new project will pave the way in understanding and improving the holistic performance of low carbon, healthy school buildings, and inform the development of effective policies and best practice school design guidance in close collaboration with our stakeholders.