Despite the fact that 10 million children in the UK spend 30% of their life at school, around 70% of that time inside a classroom, the building design determinants of indoor environmental quality in classrooms are poorly understood to date. However, there is significant evidence that poor indoor air quality and exposure to excess indoor temperatures can have detrimental impacts on the learning performance and health of pupils, in particular asthma, placing a high burden on national health services. This is particularly important when we take into account the increased vulnerability of children's bodies to indoor environmental hazards: Children breathe more indoor air pollutants than adults for their size, have a limited ability to thermoregulate and their immune systems are still developing. School buildings are, in the meantime, responsible for 15% of the UK's total public sector carbon emissions, with energy costs associated with heating, cooling, lighting and appliances being a large portion of school budgets. The school building sector could, therefore, play a pivotal role in the UK's transition to a low carbon building stock. Policymakers, building designers, school managers, educators and parents in the UK recognise the importance of creating healthy and low carbon school environments but they need the tools and mechanisms to identify the best strategies to achieve them. Ensuring high indoor environmental quality in our school buildings whilst meeting pressing carbon emissions reduction targets is an urgent research priority and a major engineering challenge for the UK construction industry. Addressing it will not only help tackle the Government's 2018 Industrial Strategy Clean Growth targets but also help meet national strategic needs to protect the most vulnerable in society, increase educational attainment and reduce health inequities. As a response to this challenge, the interdisciplinary project ASPIRE aims to address a key knowledge gap: Can school buildings achieve low carbon emissions whilst maintaining high indoor environmental quality that enhances learning and health? Our work will bring together, for the first time, three of Europe's largest studies on the impact of classroom indoor air quality and temperature, and schoolchildren's learning and health in temperate climates. Their novel, systematic co-analysis will establish relationships between exposures to indoor air pollutants, temperatures and ventilation rates and cognitive performance and health symptoms for a wide range of educational settings. We will analyse Department for Education data to construct a library of school building archetypes that are statistically representative of the UK school building stock. The archetype descriptions will include details such as interior layouts and building fabric characteristics and will be used to simulate the energy, thermal and indoor air quality performance of each archetype under low carbon building design and operational strategies in the current and future climate. These scenarios will be co-created as a result of two-way communication with stakeholders from the government, public health bodies, the construction industry and school communities during extensive, structured workshops that form an integral part of the ASPIRE project. By using the relationships established during the systematic analysis of existing field data and the modelled indoor air pollution and temperature exposure levels, we will evaluate the impacts of building energy efficient design and operational strategies, occupancy and climate change scenarios on educational attainment, and health costs at the national level. This tremendously exciting new project will pave the way in understanding and improving the holistic performance of low carbon, healthy school buildings, and inform the development of effective policies and best practice school design guidance in close collaboration with our stakeholders.

The UK is on the brink of a new, third age of energy efficiency. UK greenhouse gas emissions must fall a further 65% by 2050, but the energy system will decarbonise even faster. Large wind, marine and solar generators, supported by energy storage, will dominate the central supply system and intelligent, community and building-integrated systems will be embedded in our towns and cities. This interaction of people, buildings and energy systems will transform the relationship between supply and demand. Our domestic and non-domestic buildings can no longer be passive consumers of heat and power, instead, our homes and businesses must participate actively in a flexible, integrated, low-carbon supply and demand system, buying, selling and storing heat and power to achieve 'Energy resilience through security, integration, demand management and decarbonisation'. This must be achieved whilst simultaneously meeting our human need for high quality spaces in which to live and work, thereby increasing the productivity of the UK economy, reducing fuel poverty, improving health and wellbeing, and supporting an ageing population. The new EPSRC CDT in Energy Resilience and the Built Environment (ERBE) will train at least 50 PhD graduates to understand the systemic, radical, multi and interdisciplinary challenges we face, and have the leadership credentials to effect change. Students will be immersed in world-leading research environments at UCL, Loughborough University collaborating with the Centre for Marine and Renewable Energy in Ireland. ERBE students will attain a depth of understanding only possible as cohorts work and learn together. An integrated, 4-year programme will be co-created with our stakeholder partners and students. It will provide the knowledge, research and transferable skills to enable outstanding graduates from physics to social sciences to pursue research in one of three themes: * Flexibility and resilience: the interaction between buildings and the whole supply system, through new generation and storage technology, enabled by smart control systems and new business models. * Technology and system performance: demand reduction and decarbonisation of the built environment through design, construction methods, technological innovation, monitoring and regulation. * Comfort, health and well-being: buildings and energy systems that create productive work environments and affordable, clean, safe homes. The Centre will be led by Directors who have worked together for over 30 years, supported by deputies, academic managers, administrators and a course development team who have successfully delivered the CDT in Energy Demand. Over 50 world-leading academics are available as student supervisors. The core team will be guided by an Advisory Board representing the UK government, energy suppliers, research organisations, consultancies, construction companies and charities; more than 30 prominent individuals have expressed an interest in joining the board. Board members and stakeholders will provide secondments, business skills training and careers advice. The Centre will provide training and research benefits to the wider energy and buildings community. A new online Buildings, Energy, Resilience and Demand Hub will be created to share training materials, videos, seminars and to promote collaboration, a residential, weeklong programme, Energy Resilience and the Built Environment, will be open to PhD students from across the world as will an annual, student-led conference. An annual Anglo-Irish summer school and a colloquium will showcase the Centre's work and bring students face-to-face with potential future employers. By providing training in a rigorous, world-leading, stakeholder-shaped, outward-facing and multi-centred research environment, the new ERBE CDT will help the UK achieve the goals in the government's Industrial Strategy and Clean Growth Strategy.