Our Role

Bury & Blyth were among the first SEND schools in the UK to achieve the Passivhaus standard. These pioneering projects were part of our ongoing collaboration with Bowmer + Kirkland and our extensive work on education buildings throughout the UK.

As the Passivhaus designers/consultants for the project through to completion we identified that each classroom has fewer students (lower internal gains) but also the Output Specification required very high ventilation rates, thus making Passivhaus harder to achieve than mainstream schools. Early stage modelling identified several aspects of the Output Specification from the Department for Education had significant energy penalties, we worked with the developer to query the brief, bringing the ventilation rates down in areas where they weren't needed and enabling them to use their standard construction system.

The construction was a timber offsite panel with integral windows and external cladding; we helped them to understand the requirements of passivhaus and work out what the risk aspects were around continuous insulation and airtightness, and to document the construction.

This was also one of the first education projects we worked on with decentralised ventilation; this led to much greater involvement during the commissioning and the creation of our detailed commissioning guidance here.