Creating the right environment for learning

^{Image: Capricorn Blinds: Wireless motorised blinds with a concealed top profile to hide the blinds from view when retracted and to operate as one when moving.}

Daniel Surey, communications manager at the British Blind and Shutter Association, explains the benefits blinds and shutters offer in educational settings, including the role they can play in supporting the health and wellbeing of students and staff, while saving energy.

Rewind 20 or 30 years and ask most people to name one benefit of shading in a school or education setting, and their answer is likely to relate to when the window blinds were pulled down as the teacher wheeled in a cumbersome television or prepared the overhead projector for the start of the lesson.

While controlling light and glare is still extremely important today, shading products offer many additional benefits which are being enhanced even further with advances in fabric innovation and technology. Using shading to control temperatures in internal spaces to support people’s health and wellbeing as well as help deliver energy efficiency and sustainability is now widely recognised and understood.

With Climate Risk Management warning that around 20,000 schools in England could soon exceed the 26°C overheating threshold for one-third of the academic year if global warming reaches 2°c above pre-industrial temperatures, overheating in classrooms is becoming a real challenge. 

We know that an educational environment which is too warm is not going to be conducive towards good learning or productivity because heat has a negative effect on the body and people’s ability to concentrate.

Internal and external

To help mitigate the impact of rising temperatures in indoor environments, external or internal shading can be used as an energy efficient, passive (doesn’t use energy) solution. Typically, external shading is more effective than internal shading because it significantly reduces the sun’s heat having contact with the glazing.

If external shading is not an option, internal shading with reflective coatings can also help control excess solar irradiation. It’s important to note that shading goes hand-in-hand with ventilation strategies because it is important to remove warm air from buildings to help keep internal temperatures comfortable. 

Note: Shading can be fitted with guide wires, channels or other guides to reduce movement when ventilation is deployed.

Latest research

Research commissioned by the British Blind and Shutter Association (BBSA) found the ‘feels like temperature’, reached a scorching 47.5°C in rooms without shading. Rooms which had external blinds reached a maximum of just 28°C. A staggering 41 per cent reduction. 

Rooms with lowered internal blinds peaked at 32°c, which is still too hot but the rooms had limited ventilation to help remove the heat which had built up during the day.  

If we delve into the numbers in even greater detail, the case for shading becomes even more compelling. G-value is the measurement of total solar energy transmittance through glazing. Gtot, however, is a more relevant measurement because it combines the total solar energy transmittance through the glazing and shading.

The Shard, in London, is fully-glazed with a double-skinned façade containing automated blinds. When they are lowered the building achieves a Gtot rating of just 0.12. That equates to an incredible 88 per cent heat rejection for a building clad entirely in glass. Its architects have acknowledged it wouldn’t have been possible to fully glaze the Shard without solar shading.

At the opposite end of the scale, when the nights draw in and temperatures drop, shading can help preserve heat. Research commissioned by the BBSA at the University of Salford’s Energy House Labs, found that blinds and shutters can reduce heat loss through double low-e glazing by up to 33 per cent.

A long-term investment

While buying and installing blinds may seem a cost, money will be saved on heating and cooling, mean they will be a worthwhile investment over the long-term.

Now, at this point, you may be thinking that a natural result of lowering blinds in order to keep the sun out is that it will plunge your room into darkness but blinds do not need to be opaque to help control light and heat.

Thanks to innovative fabrics, blinds can control glare and heat gain while allowing light into the room and allowing for a view outside too.

And that’s crucial because alongside the benefits of retaining heat in the winter and reducing solar gains in the summer, controlling light and glare is vital in an educational environment. 

One study analysed the test scores of 21,000 students from three school districts in the United States.

In the California district, students with the most daylight in their classrooms progressed 20 per cent faster on maths tests and 26 per cent on reading tests in one year than those with the least daylight. Students in classrooms with the largest window areas were found to progress 15 per cent faster in maths and 23 per cent faster in reading.

 The Seattle and Fort Collins results showed students in classrooms with the most daylight were found to have 7-18 per cent higher scores than those with the least.

Illumination levels

Higher illumination levels have repeatedly been shown to increase visibility to perform tasks; daylight is a better quality of light than artificial lighting because of its distribution, colour rendition and absence of flickering.

  Daylight may also help students directly by improving their mood, or indirectly, by improving the mood of the teachers and helps keep students alert by suppressing the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone. It’s clear then, that we don’t want to remove natural light from our learning environments.

Automation

Automation means blinds can be programmed to be lowered at a certain point of the day during the winter when the sun is low in the sky or set to help retain heat overnight, reducing the amount of time heating systems are needed to warm the building and lowering energy costs. 

The fact your shading needs to be in the right place at the right time is often overlooked.  You could have the best performing fabric in the world but if it’s not applied correctly it won’t be effective. Linking shading products to building management systems or environmental controls ensures the position of the blind, shutter or awning can be optimised using automation.

 Automation is also inherently child safe and will prevent any unauthorised usage of the shading products.

Make it safe

If an education setting is to go ahead with the installation of shading products, the safety of any window blinds needs to be a key consideration.

The BBSA’s Make it Safe campaign highlights the importance of ensuring new and existing products are safe. Cord free options, such as gear-operation, wand operation and motorisation are available across a range of products and should be prioritised where possible.

And, while not a mandatory requirement, the BBSA recommends all fabrics on blinds are flame retardant to BS 5867 standard.

Shading products can often be designed to match the colours of the school or display the school’s crest, while light-excluding blinds are available for laboratories and performance spaces which need a high degree of darkness.

For more information about the benefits of shading products, find your local BBSA member here.