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

尽管英国有1000万儿童一生中30%的时间在学校度过，其中约70%的时间在教室里，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，糟糕的室内空气质量和暴露在过高的室内温度下可能对学生的学习成绩和健康产生不利影响，特别是哮喘，给国家卫生服务造成沉重负担。当我们考虑到儿童身体对室内环境危害的脆弱性增加时，这一点尤其重要：儿童比成年人呼吸更多的室内空气污染物，体温调节能力有限，他们的免疫系统仍在发育中。与此同时，学校建筑占英国公共部门碳排放总量的15%，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存量的过渡中发挥关键作用。英国的政策制定者、建筑设计师、学校管理者、教育工作者和家长认识到创造健康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战略。在满足紧迫的碳减排目标的同时，确保我们学校建筑的高室内环境质量是英国建筑业的一项紧迫的研究重点和重大工程挑战。解决这一问题不仅有助于实现政府2018年产业战略清洁增长目标，还有助于满足保护社会最弱势群体、提高教育水平和减少健康不平等的国家战略需求。作为对这一挑战的回应，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，以促进学习和健康？我们的工作将首次汇集欧洲三项最大的研究，即教室室内空气质量和温度的影响，以及温带气候下学生的学习和健康。他们新颖、系统的联合分析将在广泛的教育环境下建立暴露于室内空气污染物、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，以构建一个学校建筑原型库，这些原型在统计上代表英国的学校建筑库存。原型描述将包括室内布局和建筑面料特征等细节，并将用于模拟每个原型在低碳建筑设计下的能源、热力和室内空气质量表现，以及在当前和未来气候下的运营策略。这些情景将通过与来自政府、公共卫生机构、建筑业和学校社区的利益攸关方在构成ASPIRE项目组成部分的广泛、结构化的研讨会上进行双向沟通而共同创造。我们将利用在对现有现场数据进行系统分析期间建立的关系以及模拟的室内空气污染和温度暴露水平，在国家一级评估建筑节能设计和运营战略、入住率和气候变化情景对教育水平和医疗费用的影响。这个令人振奋的新项目将为了解和改善低碳、健康的校舍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南提供信息。

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.