With sustainability still widely seen as an unaffordable extra for cash-strapped education budgets, Carl Saxon, regional director at Wallace Whittle, explains why affordable net zero schools depend on design decisions made before anyone breaks ground
There is a persistent perception that sustainable schools cost significantly more to deliver, and it is broadly accurate. Not so long ago a school could be built with basic light fittings, a gas boiler, a few radiators and not much else, cheap and cheerful because the public purse demanded it. However, since 2021 the Department for Education (DfE) has required new schools to be net zero carbon in operation, without offsite offsetting. In February this year, the DfE replaced its output specification with new design standards under its Construction Framework 2025, and while the detail has changed, the standards remain considerably more onerous than standard building regulations.
So, it is no longer about whether to build sustainable schools; it’s instead about how to make them affordable when both school budgets and design budgets are already severely constrained. This leads to a question the industry rarely asks: why does every school get designed from scratch?
The case for standardisation
The post-war school building programmes understood something we appear to have forgotten: that standard design meant known costs. Anyone who grew up in that era can recognise the same school building in counties hundreds of miles apart. Whereas today every school is an individual, and it is difficult to predict what any given one will cost.
But standardisation does not have to mean identical buildings – the component parts are where the savings live. If ten schools in a programme share the same specification of doors, windows, roof tiles and light fittings, the buying power alone could deliver sizable discounts. If classrooms are designed to consistent sizes, the same heating, cooling, lighting and ventilation kit can simply be repeated, driving down procurement and installation costs. It also opens the door to offsite manufacturing, with less waste and more quality control, and it would simplify compliance.
The obvious objection is identity. Schools are expected to be aspirational places, and nobody wants a return to institutional boxes that all look the same. But that ambition and a standardised kit of parts are not mutually exclusive. A building can have its own character while sharing its doors and windows with the school in the next town. Given the pressure on budgets, it is reasonable to ask why it has taken the government until now to move. The DfE’s new design standards include a pattern book of standard designs. It is a welcome step, but it only delivers savings if the industry embraces it rather than designs around it. The barriers remain cultural rather than technical.
A school’s first job is not net zero
It is worth stepping back to what a school is for, because affordability arguments can lose sight of it. A school’s primary purpose is to provide an effective learning environment where young people can thrive, flourish and grow, and that has become more demanding.
Mainstream schools are increasingly inclusive, with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision integrated rather than separate, which raises the bar for the environment. Classrooms need to be well ventilated, so pupils stay alert, and they need to be comfortable year-round and properly lit through every season. Schools are no longer nine-to-three buildings either, and extended community use pushes energy consumption higher still.
Get the design right, and the building itself becomes an educational asset. Pupils increasingly expect eco-conscious practice from their schools; for example, we have seen glass-fronted plant rooms that classroom groups can visit, with live energy and carbon data linked back to lessons. That is a return on investment no spreadsheet captures.
Where each pound works hardest
Whether or not standardisation arrives, there is a well-established order for spending on a sustainable school. It ranks improvements by how much difference each pound makes, and we describe it as lean, mean and green.
Lean comes first, and it simply means getting the building itself right. How it faces the sun, how well it is insulated and how well it is sealed against draughts. Every school has to have walls, windows, floors and a roof anyway, so a small increase in budget to make them work harder is not an added extra. A building that holds onto its heat in winter and keeps it out in summer needs far less equipment to stay comfortable, which makes everything that follows smaller and cheaper. We are currently working on a school where the site layout ruled out formal Passivhaus certification, but the same measures still deliver the bulk of the benefit.
Mean is the equipment inside, things like LED lighting and air source heat pumps, chosen for efficiency and sized for what the building actually needs. Our industry has a quiet habit of over-specifying just in case, on the logic that you can turn a system down but you cannot turn it up. That caution costs money twice: once when you buy the kit and again every year you run it.
Green comes last, and deliberately so. Solar panels should cover whatever energy use remains after the first two stages have done their work, not make up for skipping them. Where roof space is limited, panels mounted on canopies over car parking are an increasingly common answer. There is also the carbon cost of the materials themselves to consider. Products shipped halfway around the world from coal-powered economies carry a footprint that never appears on the invoice.
The building is only half the answer
Even a well-designed school will miss its targets if it is not operated correctly, and this is where the sector is least supported. Net zero in operation depends on the people running the building. Staff need training to manage systems properly and to run the whole school in a net zero manner, from a credible climate action plan through to decisions about waste and supplies. Schools are being asked to make tangible progress towards net zero without the clear guidance or practical tools to do it. Closing that gap would cost a fraction of what it saves.
Existing schools are a different question
Most of the school estate already exists, including a great many Victorian buildings nobody sensibly wants to pull down. Nothing is more sustainable than reusing a structure that has stood for many years, because the embodied carbon of building it again is avoided entirely. Here the gains come from the servicing and the engineering rather than the envelope, though the two cannot be separated. Replace a gas boiler with an air source heat pump and consequential fabric improvements follow, because the lower grade of heat only keeps a building warm if U-values improve alongside it. Retrofit is rarely a single intervention but a chain of them, and sequencing that chain properly is where the affordability lives.
The cost curve only bends one way
The capital cost of a net zero school is higher, but these are buildings designed for lower energy use across a long life, at a time when every school knows what energy price exposure feels like. That premium will not stand still either, because the more we build, the better the techniques are understood and the cheaper each one becomes.
None of this waits on a technological breakthrough. What stands between the education sector and its sustainability targets is a set of design decisions, made early and in the right order, then repeated rather than reinvented every time.
It is a privilege to work in this sector, because the buildings we design play a part in pupils achieving more and going on to better lives. That brings a responsibility to get the formula right across cost, building quality, energy and carbon. Do that, give schools the direction to run these buildings well, and those targets stop looking unaffordable at all.
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