BUILDINGS, MAINTENANCE & REFURBISHMENT
Warmth, wellbeing and the bottom line
JIM WARD, Scottish Regional Director at BAM UK & Ireland, tells Education Today how the company is making Passivhaus possible – as Scotland’s Passivhaus schools lead the way.
heating and the lack of effective insulation. Now, in the new campus, those worries had gone. The reason? Passivhaus, an accredited building method that delivers ultra-low-energy buildings by combining super-insulation, airtight construction, heat-recovery ventilation and strict performance testing to ensure the finished structure meets its modelled efficiency.
I am a strong believer that Passivhaus builds offer a ‘power of three’ environment boost for school building. They’re better for the actual environment, they’re better for kids’ learning environment – and they’re better for the wider financial environment. They’re a win-win-win.
O
n a raw January morning earlier this year, pupils streamed into St Columba’s RC High School and Woodmill High School, part of the Dunfermline Learning Campus and – for the first time in living memory – kept their coats on the peg all day. The cloakrooms were silent, the radiators too: only a gentle hum from the ventilation told you the building was awake.
For years, parkas and duffel coats had made their way into the classroom because of poor
What exactly is Passivhaus? Although often described as a ‘low energy’ standard, Passivhaus, originally developed in Germany, is perhaps better understood as a quality assurance process that begins on the drawing board and ends only when the building proves, through air-pressure tests and in-use monitoring, that it performs as promised.
Local authorities recognise the quality standards of Passivhaus accreditation, where design details and service strategies are scrutinised pre-construction to ensure performance standards are met. Rigorous
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on-site checking and evidence gathering are required throughout construction, with particular attention to commissioning to align actual performance with design intentions. A stringent air tightness test is also required, emphasising the importance of design and construction quality.
The structure is wrapped in a thick blanket of insulation, detailing every junction so that heat cannot leak out through thermal bridges. Triple glazed windows are oriented to collect free winter sunshine while deep reveals and external shading prevent summer glare. Fresh air is supplied continuously by mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, which captures around 90 percent of the warmth that would otherwise be lost. Finally, painstaking airtightness work reduces uncontrolled drafts to such an extent that an entire campus can be pressurised with a single fan.
Together these measures slash the space- heating demand to around 15 kWh per square metre per year, roughly a quarter of a typical new build, and when paired with electric heat pumps, translate into an eighty-plus percent cut in lifetime carbon emissions compared with a gas-heated baseline.
Proof in the playground BAM UK & Ireland has delivered one
July/August 2025
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