Lessons Learned from Irish Schools: Early-stage Insights on Overheating

Overheating in school buildings is likely to lead to a negative learning performance experience for occupants in these settings. In Ireland, school buildings are primarily naturally ventilated, given the relative increases in external mean temperatures that are projected to have negative effects on the potential of natural ventilative cooling going forward, it is important to assess what the current overheating status is in these buildings. Existing work has already highlighted the lack of measurement data on overheating in low energy school buildings. Additionally, the literature also supports a difference in comfort between adults and children as well differences between temperature suitable for learning performance assessments and comfort assessments in school settings. In this presentation, early-stage insights on overheating in school buildings in Ireland will be presented with a subset of data from the RESILIENCE project. A series of comfort-based and performance-based metrics will be used to contextualise this data which was gathered in 2022/2023. Additionally, lessons learned from site visits as well as inputs from a calibrated whole building simulation model will be used to determine to what extent is overheating an issue in Irish schools and are they likely to overheat in the future.