An education in itself

Jan 2009 | By Richard Simmonds

Lighting designers, architects and energy consultants met in London to discuss the challenges of working in schools, colleges and universities

Ray Molony: There’s been a massive investment in education. What lessons can we learn from the first wave of installations?

Stefan Jakobek: Schools are not only places for learning, they’re places for teaching. We need to provide teaching environments that allow teachers to get on with their jobs effectively.

On the one hand you have to get the lighting right and effective, but it must be an inspiring and pleasant place to be. Anybody can design 500 lux on the working plane, but an effective learning environment is much more than that, and artificial lighting and daylight is going to play an important part. And if we do our job properly, you shouldn’t need artificial lighting most of the time.

Theo Paradise-Hirst: Max Fordham was brought in to work on a range of projects called Millennium Plazas. We worked on a prototype with Alsops, and that involved engaging with teachers.

The first prototype was done three or four years ago and that was a simple lighting system with some controls.

Lighting changes throughout the day to create a slightly more inspirational atmosphere. After lunch is a time when pupils are quite disruptive or hard to engage with, so we looked at changing the quality of light distribution and direction to change the atmosphere. We were adjusting the direction, intensity and quality of light. We introduced coloured light too, so the quality of the interior surfaces change slowly over time. We worked with manufacturers to make the controls as easy as possible to use.

Ray Molony: Has any research been done on the effect of lighting in education?

Mark Ridler: In the US, they took a whole series of schools that had no access to daylight and others that had good access and did a very rigourous piece of research that takes other factors into account and has a very large sample.

The differential in literacy and numeracy between daylit and non-daylit schools can be 20 or 25 per cent.

Julia Barfield: It’s a combination of light and ventilation. And joy is important, but you can’t measure joy.

Mark Ridler: One school that we’ve been involved with in Ramsgate moved into a new academy building. The pupil, teacher and parent surveys let you measure subjective things. Truancy and graffiti plummeted, there was a sense of pride.

Daylight is absolutely crucial, and the view is very important. Of course, it depends what the view is of.

Going further
Robin Dryer: We work on higher and further education projects. They’re a different animal. Projects vary from car parks to nurseries to gyms and teaching facilities.

But estate managers don’t talk about lighting directly, it’s something that gets left behind. The architect or the lighting designer has to bring it to their attention. It might, however, be tied in with Breeam or daylighting requirements.

You’re pulling in fittings that would traditionally be seen elsewhere and putting them into an education environment.

Colour changing, for example, is a tool at your disposal.

Theo Paradise-Hirst: And that is applicable to primary and secondary schools. I think further education would demand a different approach, but we are using coloured lighting in a very controlled way - it’s not a disco, the colours are appropriate to the teaching environment.

Barrie Wilde: We did a school in Newham four or five years ago which was mixed ability. The use of colour was very important for wayfinding, either for children with visual disabilities or those who couldn’t read or write. It worked extremely well.

Florence Lam: There are very different needs between primary, secondary and tertiary education. Primary schools should be stimulating and daylighting is great. But there’s no regulation about what is good and bad.

We need to ask the architect how the building can be designed so the natural light comes in and, for example, how the learning facilities are clustered. The problems should be designed out rather than dealt with later on.

In secondary and higher education, heads are being encouraged to be more like businesspeople. So a school hall has to be multifunctional. They are looking for ways to use the school buildings in the evenings, at the weekends and during the summer to generate revenue.

Lighting designers should get more involved and influence others to adopt a more holistic approach.

Living daylight
Florence Lam: We also need intuitive controls. Without controls, if the sun comes onto a room one day and the blinds are lowered, the next day they’ll still be down.

Stefan Jakobek: Yes, if designers don’t control glare, down go the blinds and on come the artificial lights and it stays like that for the rest of the day. We have made a massive switch to [Autodesk’s] Revit so we can look at buildings as three-dimensional models very early on. It makes it easier to use daylight.

Barrie Wilde: One of the tragedies in the lighting industry is the use of the average daylight factor in the British Standard condemns half the room to less than the average.

Daylight factor in schools used to be a minimum. It was in the darkest corner of the farthest part of the room. That meant you had to handle your windows very carefully. Words fail me that we reissued this document describing exactly the same criteria that we knew were failing previously.

Martin Valentine: There’s also a tendency to pull classrooms into the school to solve heat and cooling issues, and relying on a central street as a trendy central space. But there is less likelihood of windows, and if there are windows, they are shrinking.

And there are planning issues for windows overlooking neighbourhoods. It could get worse.

A suitable brief
Ray Molony: What are the briefs like? Is daylighting and artificial lighting on the agenda?

Robin Dryer: On a project we worked on in Glasgow, light levels were set out as part of the brief. That was quite good to see.

Gary Tozer: We are working on a BSF school at the moment and daylighting is an important part of the brief.

Ray Molony: And do people want high Breeam ratings?

Mark Ridler: People do understand Breeam and sometimes there’s even money there to achieve an ‘Excellent’ rating.

Julia Barfield: It’s my experience that they’re only trying to get to ‘Very Good’.

Mark Ridler: We did a campus building at Newport in Wales where £10 million of funding was contingent on achieving ‘Excellent’. That came from the client. There has to be financial muscle behind it.

Julia Barfield: A huge amount of money is being wasted in the procurement process. Each school gets designed multiple times by competing teams. It would be better to choose one designer and do it once.

Mark Ridler: Lots of the early work we did was on the academies, where there was a more traditional design process. Under BSF, things are being designed in competition - two or three people trying to minimise design activity at that stage. As soon as someone wins the contract, they say “right, we’ve designed the school” and now we’re going to planning.

Lamps and luminaires
Ray Molony: Who chooses the luminaires?

Mark Ridler: The contractor.

Ray Molony: Does BSF have a say?

Julia Barfield: We make suggestions and they come back with options.

Richard Holt: Often it’s not the electrical contractor that’s making the decision, it’s the main contractor. The main contractor sets up a supply chain and everyone runs off that chain.

Robin Dryer: On a design and build job, we find that if we can stay with the contractor, we’ve got a fighting chance of getting 50-60 per cent of the light fittings that we want. It depends how passionate you are.

Theo Paradise-Hirst: It’s a bit of a false economy when things get changed because in the long term it’s going to come back and bite the end user. One thing you can do is try to make the specification very detailed so that things are documented if substitution starts to occur.

Ray Molony: Are all the lamps T5 with high-frequency gear?

Martin Valentine: No! T8 is absolutely not a dead technology, there’s a lot of research going into it, it’s very low glare and if you look at the consumed power densities, T8 often performs better than T5.

Ray Molony: Is it easier to hold spec on good lamps and gear?

Mark Ridler: Funnily enough, that doesn’t seem to be challenged in quite the same way. It tends to be less controversial.

Ray Molony: Outside the classrooms, what about the circulation and ‘chill-out’ areas?

Mark Ridler: There’s a real opportunity there. It’s typically 20 per cent of the cost rather than 80 per cent and clients understand those spaces much more and have much stronger aspirations. There are some very good ways of designing good lighting in there, and designing the cost out, particularly if you have an early relationship with the architect.

Richard Cameron: These spaces are becoming more important. They are crucial from a lighting point of view, a lot of learning goes on there.

Reviewing the situation
Mark Ridler: One of my frustrations is that you would think, in a large building programme like this, that there would be some kind of consensus.

Julia Barfield: There were the exemplars, we did one of those. I just think it was such a shame that they didn’t just go ahead and build one of each. A huge amount could have been learnt.

Mark Ridler: There’s no feedback loop. Some of these shools are completed, why aren’t they being assessed?

Julia Barfield: There is a programme to go back to the schools a year after. But it’s not started yet.

Stefan Jakobek: And there are issues of commercial confidentiality. PFI is competitive, and it’s not a great forum for sharing knowledge. It’s been successful at driving down costs, but it’s debatable whether it drives up quality.

Around the table

The participants in the Trilux/Lighting education lighting forum were:
Julia Barfield, Marks Barfield
Mike Brown, LAPD
Richard Cameron, lighting discipline leader, Buro Happold
Robin Dryer, associate, RMJM Cambridge Studio
Richard Holt, managing director, Trilux
Stefan Jakobek, vice-president, head of schools architecture, HOK International
Florence Lam, head of lighting, Arup
Helen Loomes, marketing manager, Trilux
Ray Molony, editor, Lighting magazine
Theo Paradise-Hirst, head of lighting design, Max Fordham Consulting Engineers
Mark Ridler, director, BDP
Gary Tozer, Waterman
Martin Valentine, head of lighting, Faber Maunsell
Darrell West, sales manager, Trilux
Barrie Wilde