Children 'falling asleep in stuffy eco-classrooms'

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Builders have created air-tight classrooms which are intended to reduce heat loss but also stop carbon dioxide escaping.

Higher CO2 levels in newly-built schools are leaving children drowsy and less able to concentrate, researchers from University College London and Reading University found.

The studies will come as a blow to Children's Secretary Ed Balls, who wants every new school to be "zero-carbon" from 2016. UCL researcher Dr Dejan Mumovic said ministers had "rushed" their sustainable schools programme. He monitored 10 schools built 50 year ago and nine erected under the Government's £45 billion Building Schools for the Future programme. "The ventilation rates were equally appalling," he told the Times Educational Supplement. CO2 levels are exceeding targets, and that can affect the learning performances of kids."

Kim Knappett, a science teacher from Forest Hill School in Lewisham, said her new classrooms were either far too hot or freezing. Stiflingly hot classrooms lead to an increase in disruptive behaviour as pupils become "irritable", she said.

"It's just too hot and everybody falls asleep or gets ratty," Ms Knappett told the Standard. "They can't work properly."

The school's new buildings cost more than £20 million but one window which broke the week after the classrooms opened in January has still not been fixed, she said. A separate study by Reading University tested the reaction times and memory of pupils in rooms with high levels of CO2. Professor Derek Clements-Croome, who led the research, said: "When the CO2 was very high, the reaction times would slow and memory would be affected. The kids would also get drowsier.

"You may not even detect that it's getting stuffier in the room but once higher CO2 levels are breathed in it gets into the blood and goes to the brain."

Ministers want to rebuild or renovate every secondary school in the country. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment said a flow of fresh air was essential.