Safe schools for the future – The Timber Industry Yearbook

Seb Laan Lomas explains how new fire research and real-world data from 17 timber schools show how a proven, low-impact design approach can deliver safe, healthy, insurable buildings—fit for people and planet.

New fire research, led by Architype Architects, and carried out with UCL, the University of Edinburgh, and IGNIS, explores the conservatism of current practice, and clarifies the benefits of a physics-based approach when creating high-performance, high-health, low- impact schools for the future.

Art ssf materials — Many of the components used in the analysed build-up can be UK-sourced, or have the potential to be. Source: Safe Schools for the Future report

The benefits of a physics-based approach

This research, funded by the Forestry Commission under its Woods into Management Forestry Innovation Fund, demonstrates how timber frame construction, viewed through the lens of a simulated built case study, can be shown to have its structural integrity unaffected by internal fire scenarios. Analysis by Professor José L. Torero of UCL also demonstrates that the calculated fires in the case study’s primary school environments are significantly less onerous than furnace test conditions used for creating fire certificates. The analysis shows that no fires would develop to achieve post- flashover conditions, and that the simulations did not experience fires that would threaten the building’s integrity. This compounds aspects of conservativeness within standard practice and sets out a workflow for project teams that have experienced the severely limiting and challenging realities of fire certificates.

These forward-looking insights have been paired with monitored, in-use health and wellbeing, energy performance, and embodied carbon data of 17 completed primary schools across England, Scotland, and Wales. All of these buildings are of timber-frame construction, using a low-tech, high- performance assembly that is implementable at scale today and an ideal opportunity for meeting the Government’s ambition to increase the use of timber in construction to support the country’s decarbonisation.

Art ssf fire performance — How long is long enough? Scenario-specific analysis showed the building’s structure indefinitely outlasting industry standard requirements. Source: Safe Schools for the Future report

A tried and tested design approach

The tried and tested architectural design approach demonstrated within the report also delivers healthier classrooms, high-emitting, harmful materials with bio-based materials, and enjoying the fresh air benefits of an efficiently and effectively ventilated space. Recent PhD research on these buildings has shown conventional classrooms to be 1.5 times as harmful due to the materials used, and poorer airtightness and ventilation.

This holistic approach is underpinned by industry-leading quality assurance driven by an independent certification—Passivhaus in these instances. This is viewed by the project’s insurance stakeholder, Phil Callow of Rosetta Risk Management, as an invaluable contribution to demonstrating the insurability of a building.

This new open-source publication shares construction details, workflows, lessons learned, design guidance, and the collected data from these 17 case study schools, with new health and wellbeing and fire research, to support project teams to scale up the use of home-grown timber for schools that are fit for people, place, and planet.

“Physics-based analysis reveals classroom fires can be far less severe than standard tests assume—illustrating a path to lower-carbon yet safe, scalable timber schools.”