school

The subject of this study was the indoor air quality of schools with natural ventilation in La Coruna (Spain). We took as reference the C0₂ H₂O and CO contents of both the indoor and outdoor air. In both cases the monitoring was carried out over a 48 hour period using a photoacoustic infra-red spectroscopy multi-gas monitor. The outdoor air quality was seen to be good.

The draft of the European prestandard 17 52, entitled "Ventilation for buildings – Design criteria for the indoor environment" is intended to be a flexible tool for assisting the designer in providing a proper indoor environment for people in ventilated buildings. It specifies how the quality of the indoor environment, comprising the thermal environment, the air quality and the acoustic environment can be expressed.

The new buildings of Kaneyama Town Junior High School demonstrate that a well-planned and adequately designed passive solar system can work effectively even in a snowy and cold area. The OM solar system of an air heating type applied here, which is characterised by heat collection through roofs, and underfloor heating and heat storage, provides the pupils with a comfortable thermal environment in winter.

Grilningen primary school near Zurich, Switzerland, was built 20 years ago, and energy consumption, in particular for heating and lighting, was unnecessarily high. An unconventional retrofitting procedure involving new chip-wood furnace, interior insulation, mass-coupled ventilation and controlled artificial lighting was adopted. The work was carried out without interruption of normal school operation. The results are very promising and measurements indicate a drop in heat consumption of 70% with standards of comfort raised considerably.

The Jandel school in southern Sweden was thoroughly retrofitted in 1994-95. Both lighting and ventilation systems have been designed for high energy efficiency. New windows with excellent insulating performance have been installed. A before and after comparison shows that the energy required for heating has been reduced from about 210 k Wh/m2 to about 94 k Whlm2 a year, i.e. a reduction of about 55%. Electricity for building services systems has decreased by about 20%, despite the fact that considerably more computers are used in the school today than prior to rebuilding.

The paper describes a pilot-study set up to identify links between internal environmental quality and perceived well-being in a 1970's higher educational building housing the Mackintosh School of Architecture. The supposition is that such links may in turn inhibit/promote greater productivity. The study embraces a variety of working situations for staff and students and explores levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction by means of questionnaire.

The management of environmental quality of school buildings has, for too long, been the overlooked half of the larger whole of the strategic educational planning process. This paper examines the changing role of environmental quality management from its traditional operationally-based role, to an expanded, more dynamic role in strategic educational planning activities at the local, site-based level. First, a brief review of the state of knowledge concerning the impact of environmental quality on the educational process is presented.