Assessing the Social Aspects of Energy Use in School Using a Unified Database

Session 11, Paper 4, CIBSE Technical Symposium, John Moores University, Liverpool
11th and 12th April 2013

Energy use in buildings is related to a number of factors, such as the installed services and the building fabric, but regularly energy use in buildings is determined by user behaviour. School buildings are no different with many buildings using more energy than predicted as shown by CarbonBuzz. This paper examined whether school attainment is a good predictor of school energy use, using absenteeism and GCSE results as a metric of school attainment through the creation of a unified schools database. This assumes that schools which perform better in these metrics have better management not just of the students, but also of the building and therefore lower energy use. Following correction for the background of the students, it was found that schools that perform better use more energy rather than less as hypothesised, accounting for up to 11.5% of the variation in energy use between schools, depending on the metric used for evaluation.