It’s a difficult time for those working in education in the United Kingdom. The sector faces a growing mountain of challenges, including shifting student demographics, shrinking student numbers, and very tight budgets. Broader economic and demographic trends like the increased cost of living are even causing some schools to close their doors. All this puts further downward pressure on budgets and cuts in government funding — potentially up to £1 billion less by 2030.    

Environmental factors like ageing buildings and building materials, the need for climate resilience, and issues like RAAC mean many schools are now at a crunch point. Confronting these realities will require close collaboration of expertise and inventive thinking. When it comes to building stock, it’s vital that we take a ‘retrofit first’ approach wherever we can – utilising our existing buildings to save carbon.

Structural challenges in ageing schools

In recent years, leaky roofs and crumbling walls have drawn our attention to the fact that much of the materials schools are made of has surpassed their design life, and is no longer fit for purpose. 

The widespread use of lightweight materials like RAAC — reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete — has come to the fore following the collapse of a roof in a primary school in Kent. RAAC was the wonder product of its time: a cheap, easy-to-deploy solution that enabled us to get many of our public services up and running, fast in the 1950s. And while there’s been a lot of misinformation about RAAC, the condition of the material and risk-monitoring strategies for buildings it is in is vital. 

Compounding the structural challenges faced by schools are other design choices of the era too. Flat roofs, which are more susceptible to leakage than their sloped counterparts, as well as smaller specifications in the day for 40ml bearings (the iStructE guidance now specifies 75ml bearings for similar works). As water finds its way into the aerated holes that characterise RAAC, it expands and causes the slabs to sag and slip off these already too small bearings.

It’s a problem that is causing headaches for councils up and down the country, but none more so than in my neck of the woods, the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Throw in the wet and windy weather we’re accustomed to and you have, so to speak, the perfect storm. 

Getting our public services running with as little disruption as possible to avoid negatively impacting learning experiences, health outcomes, response times and more is essential. In a location as remote as the Highlands, the logistical task of moving a school is largely unfeasible. There are rarely suitable locations close enough to the original school, at a reasonable cost, for budget-stretched councils. Because of this, demolish and rebuild is often the option many councils are keen to go for, but it’s not always the right choice. We’ve worked on projects where the proposed location for a new school is on a flood plain; not the most sustainable solution in an age of climate breakdown and extreme weather patterns. However, somewhere within this web of challenges lies the solution, and it’s an engineer’s task to crack the problem.

Rethinking the RAAC crisis

The first step is educating people that while RAAC has mostly surpassed its design life, that doesn’t mean all of it is in a state of decay. Instead, we as engineers, should be providing more granular guidance on a case-by-case basis. Especially considering risk categorisation ranges from ‘low risk’, where ongoing inspection and awareness campaigns for occupants is an appropriate course of action, to ‘critical risk’ which prompts immediate action such as setting exclusion zones or full evacuation depending upon the extent’ and other more substantial engineering works. 

When we say that we take a ‘retrofit first’ approach wherever we can, we mean it. In these cases, our first step is to conduct a feasibility study/RAAC survey to assess what we can and can’t do. Often, we can reconfigure its use and utilise its excellent thermal properties by giving it new life as an insulator, by sandwiching it between two wall panels. This saves us discarding it, which would squander its embodied carbon. 

Of course, retrofitting in live learning environments is a challenge in itself. Our approach is to phase works to make the noise, dust and distraction minimally disruptive. We worked with a school in Helensburgh, which decided that students could be ‘decanted’ to other buildings in the school temporarily, allowing us to take the roof off and put a new roof on within a school year. This decisiveness enabled a quick turnaround. Of course, for some other projects, students have to stay on site while we complete more sensitive work around the children’s schedules. 

It’s not just RAAC schools that are in need of rejuvenation. In our London studio, my colleagues are working on projects like the transformation of the Haberdashers’ Monmouth Schools nested in the Wye valley. The school is responding to changing student needs by unifying two separately located single-sex campuses into mixed-gender Lower and Upper Schools. Part of that work includes a sedum-covered blue roof, and rain gardens which will manage water efficiently. In North West London, we’re helping transform two of their 19th-century buildings into state-of-the-art teaching spaces, preventing new build sprawl of the school that often occurs when student cohort numbers increase.

Each project is assessed individually — there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Yet, what unites all these projects is a focus on delivering something that, at local level, benefits students, teachers, as well as the surrounding community and environment on a more macro level. It’s this way that we deliver truly sustainable education infrastructure for generations to come.

• Isla Jackson is a structural engineer and director at Civic Engineers, leading the Scottish and Irish studios.