Cardiff Schools Post-Occupancy Evaluation Programme

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Education

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Location

Cardiff, UK

Caroline Paradise

Head of Design Research, London, UK contact form+44 20 7121 2343

A city-wide programme capturing student and staff experience to improve school design, wellbeing and long-term education investment decisions.

In 2022, the Cardiff City Council commissioned a structured Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) programme as part of the Welsh Government’s Sustainable Communities for Learning (SCfL) programme (formerly the ‘21st Century Schools and Education Programme’), which requires schools to undertake a Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) approximately one year after occupation, and its wider ambition to become a UNICEF Child Friendly City. The programme responds to significant investment in new and refurbished school environments and seeks to understand how these spaces perform beyond delivery. By focusing on lived experience, the initiative places students and staff at the centre of decision-making, ensuring that school environments support wellbeing, inclusion and effective learning while informing future education investment across the city.

The Challenge

While Cardiff has invested heavily in modernising its education estate, understanding how buildings perform in practice presented a complex challenge. Traditional evaluation methods offered only snapshots in time and often prioritised technical performance over human experience. The Council needed a consistent, evidence-based approach to capture how environments are actually perceived and used by students and staff across different school types, including mainstream and Additional Learning Needs provision. This meant addressing variability in user experience, environmental comfort and operational factors, while ensuring insights could be compared across multiple projects and over time to inform future strategy. In addition, as part of its Child Friendly Initiative the approach would require the active participation of young people as part of the evaluation process.

Part of the AtkinsRealis Pictorial Student Survey that allows young participants to visually and interactively select spaces where they prefer to undertake different tasks

Our role

AtkinsRéalis partnered with Cardiff City Council to design and implement a repeated measures POE programme across multiple schools, going above and beyond Welsh Government recommendations. The team developed a repeatable methodology using digital surveys to capture both pre- and post-occupancy experiences highlighting strengths and challenges of existing estates and how the staff and student perception changed 12 months after occupancy of their new schools.

Applying the AtkinsRéalis Human-Centred Design approach, we translated qualitative and quantitative feedback into measurable insights aligned with wellbeing factors such as comfort, light, acoustics and social interaction. Our role included analysing data across 1,900 students and 320 staff (to date), identifying patterns at both project and estate level, and enabling continuous learning to inform design guidance, operational improvements and future investment decisions.

1900 students engaged

7 schools included

320 staff participants

Cardiff Council’s School Organisation Programme (SOP) delivers significant investment in new and refurbished school buildings as part of the Education Investment Strategy.

Abigail Marks

Programme Office, Cardiff Council

To ensure this investment translates into meaningful improvements in teaching, learning and wellbeing, the Council has embedded a structured Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) process in partnership with Atkins Réalis. This approach enables the Council to assess how effectively new learning environments perform in practice, using structured feedback from staff, pupils and the wider community. By moving beyond project completion into a continuous improvement cycle, POEs play a critical role in evaluating the impact of school environments and strengthening future delivery. For young people, the process provides a direct voice in shaping their schools, helping to ensure that environments support wellbeing, engagement and inclusive learning. At a strategic level, POEs underpin key performance indicators within the Education Investment Strategy, providing robust evidence of impact, supporting funding compliance and informing future investment decisions through data-driven insights and lessons learned. Overall, the integration of POEs represents a significant step forward in how education investment is planned, delivered and evaluated, ensuring that investment in school infrastructure delivers measurable, lasting benefits for children, young people and communities across Cardiff.

The impact

The programme has established a robust evidence base linking school design to user experience and wellbeing. By comparing pre- and post-occupancy data, Cardiff Council can clearly identify how new environments improve spatial variety, experience, use and overall satisfaction. The approach also highlights areas where challenges persist, such as thermal comfort or shared space usage, enabling targeted improvements.

At a strategic level, the POE programme supports data-driven investment decisions, strengthens accountability and embeds continuous improvement across the education estate. Crucially, it provides students and staff with a direct voice, ensuring that future school environments better support inclusive learning, wellbeing and a sense of belonging.