Thrive Forum: Indoor Air Quality in Schools, Brisbane | 17 July 2025

Please join us to hear exciting presentations.

Background: Students, teachers and other staff spend a very large proportion of their time in school buildings. As more research points to how indoor air quality directly impacts both physical health and cognitive performance, legislating standards in public buildings, including schools, is an important step toward addressing a problem that many may overlook—poor ventilation and indoor air quality at schools.

School buildings are long-lived assets that provide us with places of education, recreation and work. They provide us with shelter from external elements – both natural and manmade. We expect them to keep students and staff warm when it’s cold outside and cool when it’s hot. We expect them to be safe. We expect them to be filled with clean, healthy air, free of pollutants of any kind, including infectious pathogens.

Energy is needed to meet these expectations: embodied energy in the materials for the school buildings, their services and fittings; operational energy for heating, cooling, ventilation and the multiple tasks undertaken in schools; and energy to maintain these systems and dispose of, or repurpose, these materials and systems at the end of their life.

Energy not only costs money but can also involve emissions of pollutants and the use of finite resources. Careful consideration of energy sources is required to ensure a vicious cycle of pollution or non-sustainable resource consumption isn’t embedded in solutions. Therefore, we must strive to achieve a balance between all these requirements to breathe clean air and have thermal comfort but consuming the least amount of energy possible and in a resource efficient manner.

Big questions include:

1. What do we know about the quality of air in Australian school buildings?  What pollutants are of concern? How are they linked to health and cognitive outcomes?
2. Can we achieve a balance in building performance with respect to indoor air quality, thermal comfort, and the energy needed to support this for specific school / classroom types and specific climate(s).?
3. What additional risks will climate change pose with the increased frequency of episodic pollution events, rainfall intensity, and frequency and duration of heat waves? What is the impact of these changes on indoor air quality? What additional efforts will be required to protect students and staff?
4. Can school building mechanical systems be optimised to address dynamic IEQ risk and carbon emissions?
5. Should new school buildings be mechanically ventilated?
6. Do we need more R&D? More regulation? More collaboration between all stakeholders, including occupants?

This interdisciplinary forum is relevant to experts from many fields and to anyone involved with buildings, from academics to leaders tasked with maintaining a safe and resilient internal environment of schools.

📅 Date: 17 July 2025

🕒 Time: 9:00am – 3:00pm

📍 Location: Owen J Wordsworth Room, S Block, Level 12, Room 1215, 2 George Street, Brisbane, Queensland, 4000 Australia

📝Click Here to Register for the Forum