Sustainable schools better than traditional schools?

During the last decades in the United Kingdom several educational buildings were built with a strong environmental ethos, real icons of a new generation of low-energy sustainable buildings. In some of the buildings post occupancy evaluations were held and building’s performance was revealed. Also in the Netherlands during the last years several new concepts were developed for sustainable schools. This is an interesting topic as many of those schools had problems concerning energy efficiency, indoor air quality and thermal comfort. In the case of sustainable schools much effort went into the design process of the schools to try to find better solutions to face the problems of the traditional designs. This resulted in different solution concepts, which raises the question which are better school concepts. From literature three evaluations from the UK and one overview of 5 sustainable educational buildings from the Netherlands are given, which show that sustainable educational buildings are not always without flaws. In the paper two of the first Dutch sustainable elementary schools are compared with 9 more traditional schools of the Netherlands to conclude whether the sustainable schools perform better than traditional schools