4th January 2018 1:00
By Blue Tutors
We all remember those days at school, when you resisted taking your coat off and your fingers stiffened up until you couldn’t really write anymore from cold. At least that was my experience every January in the crooked rooms of my old secondary school in the north west. Classroom environments are becoming a hot and contentious topic at the moment, after the release of a study by the University of Salford that outlines not only the effects of efficient uses of space and storage, but also of the notion of maximum temperatures in classrooms.
A minimum temperature threshold is already in place for schools across the UK (13-16C depending upon activity), meaning pupils must be sent home if this is not satisfactorily reached, and Scottish schools are taking the lead on founding a maximum temperature, too. The Educational Institute of Scotland claims that high temperatures can cause ‘fatigue, loss of concentration, impaired learning experiences and increased risk of accidents’, according to a recent BBC news article on the matter. This would also, of course, benefit teachers as well as students, as a class made lethargic by heat can be a tricky beast to inspire.
One issue with implementing this new requirement, however, is that many schools are heated with a steam-heating system. Remember that silver chimney buffering steam into the sky? That what kept you from frostbite in winter and boiled you in the summer. These systems are difficult to control at minute levels as leaks can cause false fire alarms, which further disrupt the leaning process. Hence all those days with full heating but wide-open windows during the revision months.
Windows themselves might seem like an obvious solution, but often there are architectural stipulations regarding which windows can be opened, and how far, often dictated by what floor the classroom is on, etc. One commend in the BBC article read:
“I used to work in one lab and teach in another that were virtually floor to ceiling windows that faced south. When the temperature hit 30°C by lunchtime, it made the rest of the day hell for students in school as well as myself, even with the windows and doors open whenever possible. And worse were the enforced dress regulations - no shorts for the males allowed!”
And more modern school builds are just as difficult to manager. The increased effectiveness of modern insulation means these classrooms retain heat. When you add the human temperature generated by 30 or more bodies in that room, perhaps doing group activities or moving around as part of a lesson plan, and you’re turning up the heat before you begin to take into account the steam-systems.
But of course, this is Britain - we’re not a country known for our hot summers or even our particularly cold winters. Weather-wise we’re the beige in the rainbow. But that only makes our students tolerance of warmer temperatures all lower. Teachers have known this for as long as classrooms have had glass windows - so often they recourse to dusty (what about the performance of those poor asthmatic kids?) or even rusty, if I recall correctly, plug-in fans which soothed the sweat on the brows of the front-row but barely touched a hair on little Lucy’s head at the back of the class. Often these are purchased out of the teachers own pocket, and may - perhaps fairly - be trained on their own desk for most of the day. Surely this is a sensible step forward in the assessment of learning environments, especially after the suggestions of air-filters in all classrooms posited before Christmas.
The revelation has, however, sparked some heated debate. Some recourse to the term ‘snowflake’ in reference to Scottish pupils, and revel in the apparent irony of Scotland feeling too hot. Others postulate that the UK will fall behind in global education stakes when compared to students who learn in the warmer climates of the world. But this is to miss the point that those are climates, something one grows used to, and here a temperature spike thanks to an expansive glass window is far more noticeable to even the most well-travelled of bodies.
For more information, including some accurate facts and figures on this and similar matters concerning classroom environments, read the article in this link: http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/TheImpactOfClassroomEnvironmentOnLearning.aspx