Developing a child-friendly post-occupancy assessment methodology for sustainable schools

This paper explores the development of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) methodologies for working with children and school buildings and discusses why a tailored, child-friendly method is important for both understanding and assessing the efficient use of energy. It presents work carried out in a series of workshops with pupils in 3 case study UK schools in the East and West Midlands and South Yorkshire. Whilst POE methods generally allow examination of the physical, technical and management factors influencing the actual performance of building, they can also be adapted to examine the gap between predicted and actual energy performance of a building and human behaviour is key in such investigations. Moreover, using action research-based participatory and collaborative methods in POE provides a way to explore knowledge and attitudes towards low carbon buildings influencing behaviours. Understanding why our energy use and our relationship with natural resources have to change raises complex social issues but new school environments provide a unique opportunity for feedback methods not only to improve the performance of 'sustainable' architecture, but also to examine and influence adoption of sustainable lifestyles. This paper reports our finding from PostOPE, a research project currently being run by the Civil and Building Engineering Department at Loughborough University.