Comfortable and energy efficient classrooms: sustainability through Living Labs

School as Living Labs evaluates and explores with primary school children the indoor environment of their schools, and codesigns sustainable solutions for comfortable schools through hands-on learning, building performance exploration, and citizen science.

Primary school child in red jumper looks at book on desk

Climate change is transforming how we design and use our buildings. Sustainable indoor environments and energy solutions in schools must reflect the needs, experiences, and creativity of the people who use them every day; especially children. This project puts primary school pupils at the centre of sustainability innovation by co-designing child-led Living Labs in their own classrooms.

In this Living Labs project, children become researchers, experimenting with how temperature, ventilation, and everyday actions influence comfort and energy use. By linking building performance studies with hands-on learning, we will investigate with children how they can shape their environment and coproduce strategies to improve it. Teachers and children will work together to collect data, assess classroom conditions, and develop practical, sustainable solutions for their schools.

Our project will also create an educational package that helps schools use their own building data, often collected but rarely used for learning, as a hands-on cross-disciplinary teaching tool. This will support schools in becoming active spaces for practicing and teaching sustainability, while giving children the confidence and skills to become informed, sustainable citizens.

The project aims to:

Explore how children understand energy use, thermal comfort, and ventilation in classrooms.
Embed monitoring technologies in child-friendly ways that encourage pupils to manage indoor conditions in sustainable ways.
Implement Living Lab approaches that enrich experiential sustainability learning across the curriculum.
Enable children to co-produce sustainable solutions to improve the indoor environment through creative methods, exploration, participation, and citizen science.

By involving children directly in post-occupancy evaluation and solution-making, this research builds resilience, improves indoor environments, and empowers the next generation to advocate for better, more sustainable schools.