Safe Schools for the Future

Grounded in analysis of 17 school buildings over 4 years of research, the guidance is completely open source for the industry.

Safe Schools for the Future was funded by the Forestry Commission as part of its Woods into Management Forestry Innovation Fund which sought to address some of the barriers identified by the Timber in Construction Roadmap. Demonstrating fire resistance has become an increasingly challenging and fraught barrier which has driven many structural timber projects into concrete or steel projects. Failure to aid the industry in navigating these challenges is a real threat to structural timber.

This project sought to create new tried + tested industry guidance to demonstrate the usefulness and suitability of using more progressive routes for demonstrating fire resistance, so enable more projects to be constructed from structural timber.

This has been done through two lenses, both of which applied to a real-world primary school project completed in Scotland. The first lens is the use of Eurocode 5 which is now scheduled to be fully adopted in the UK. This was used to deliver this school in real life and demonstrated up to 200% the required fire resistance.

The second lens is a broader physics-based approach which also included the geometries of the spaces within the school to model the influence this would have on real world fire development and dynamics. The findings powerfully showed flash-over never occurring – which in contrast is a fundamental assumption behind conventional furnace tests.

The publication also draws on extensive health and wellbeing, operational energy, construction cost, operational cost, fabric performance, form factor, and glazing ratio data from 17 constructed timber-frame primary schools across England, Scotland, and Wales. This guidance is therefore extensively tried + tested, and builds greater confidence across Clients, project teams, insurers, and authorities.

The project has representation from across the supply chain, and the publication includes construction details, assembly sequencing diagrams, fabric performance targets, along with all of the real-world data for the 17 case study schools.

The publication is freely available at www.SafeSchoolsForTheFuture.com and has been downloaded over 300 times since its launch.