Daylight for Health and Productivity

Use well designed VITRAL roof lights to improve educational performance, enhance students learning and increase retail sales and workers productivity.

If you are creating bright and healthy learning spaces, you may be interested in some daylighting and productivity reports, which link the affects of light and air quality with students’ capacity to learn and succeed! By understanding these basic needs you can produce comfortable and efficient learning environments which result in faster and better learning.

Projects with VITRAL roofglazing have been featured and highlighted as successful cases in seminars run by the department for Children, Schools and Families. Also three of our projects feature in the CABE Report - Creating Excellent Secondary Schools:

• Bedminster Down School
• Chaucer School
• Locking Castle Campus

*The CABE report mentions that good environmental conditions is one of the 10 points for a well designed school including optimum natural light and ventilation for different activities.

By the way, Part L of the Building Regulations now requires:

• Provision to be made to reduce solar gains and reduce the internal temperature in the summer
• Good U-Value performance of complete installation
• Air tight detailing

Of course - it is probably the architects’ intention to achieve all this - but too often, the economics of including good design features gets in the way. In this case, VITRAL is ready to collaborate with you. Our rooflight systems perfectly satisfy all the requirements.

Some key points to understand if you want to end up with successful learning environments:

According to RIBA, Cient Design Advisors:

• "Provide strategic advice
• Help clients to achieve their objectives
• Meet clients’ expectations on performance and design quality"

According to CABE the role of the Client Design Advisor is Checking and Testing. Areas where problems frequently arise are:

• "The provision of adequate ventilation to teaching spaces
• Adequate daylight for the full depth of the rooms
• Acoustic performance of large spaces such as halls or circulation areas"

Talk to VITRAL early and we can help you with these frequent problems!

More information:

• "Greening America's Schools Costs and Benefits" October 2006 by Capital E of America - a national clean energy technology and green building firm. Author Gregory Katz proves “Greening School design provides an extraordinary cost-effective way to enhance student learning” -
• Daylight and Productivity - a variety of case studies related to daylight impact on worker/student performance and retail sales.  
• Creating Excellent Secondary Schools - school building processes which include daylight necessity and solutions.