UNDERSTANDING AND IMPROVING SCHOOL AIR QUALITY
We recommend a three step approach to improving school air quality:
- Firstly, improve understanding and awareness of air quality in and around your school.
- Secondly, monitor air quality in, and ideally around, your school.
- Thirdly, consider making changes targeted at helping improve your school air quality where change is needed.
Understanding and awareness raising: Good air quality helps prevent some childhood illnesses and conditions like asthma, supports children's healthy development by enabling them to be active in their learning and playing, and has been linked with improving cognitive function, attention and learning. So good air quality at school is really important, but not everyone involved with schools is as aware of this as they could be. The SAMHE Initiative - Schools' Air quality Monitoring for Health and Education - provides free resources for schools to better understand air quality, including a teacher resource pack.
Monitoring: Air quality varies between regions, across a single city and even from room to room. It also changes with the seasons and weather. The only real way to know about air quality in your school is to monitor it. Keep your eyes open for research projects or council initiatives offering air quality monitoring. An example is SAMHE, whose schools get:
- High spec air quality monitor
- Interactive Web App enabling pupils and staff to view data on air quality in their classroom
- Curriculum-linked resources including experiments, across a range of subjects
- Opportunity for pupils to contribute to scientific research and make schools healthier places
If SAMHE isn’t recruiting schools in your area, there are other ways you can get involved with SAMHE.
Making improvements: Consider making changes targeted at helping improve your school air quality and environment - these changes might cost money, or take up people’s time, so wherever possible evidence any benefits of the changes you make; for example, through monitoring data or through a questionnaire/survey of opinions within the school.
If you are interested in exploring the potential impact of adding an air filter (e.g. HEPA) unit to your classroom then we have supported the development of the Classroom HEPA Impact Calculator, or CHEPA Tool. This helps estimate how an air filter unit could impact air quality and energy consumption in a classroom. It’s free, quick to use, and designed for non-experts. You can read more details about how the CHEPA impact calculator works here.