Schools have something no commercial building has: a long, completely empty, precisely scheduled possession every single summer, with shorter ones at Christmas and Easter. Nobody needs decanting, nothing needs working around, and the dates are published years in advance. The constraint is not access. It is the budget cycle.
The trust, local authority or governing body, on an annual budget cycle that rarely matches the work.
Six empty weeks is enough to do work that would take months around occupiers, at a far lower cost per fitting. Everything that would be awkward in a live building becomes straightforward: full floor possessions, daytime working, no out-of-hours premium, no protecting desks.
The practical consequence is that a school energy programme is planned backwards from a holiday. Specify in the autumn, procure in the spring, install in the summer. Missing the window costs a year, because the alternative is working around children.
A school is intensively occupied for roughly a third of the year and almost empty for the rest, and within term time it empties sharply at the end of the afternoon. That pattern suits controls unusually well: scheduling, occupancy sensing in halls and corridors, and setback outside term.
It also means annual consumption figures mislead. A measure sized against average occupancy will be wrong in both directions.
Classrooms are designed around daylight, often with large glazed areas and in many cases rooflights. That makes daylight-linked dimming genuinely effective here, rather than the marginal measure it is in a deep-plan office core.
The same glazing is frequently the fabric weakness, so the building that harvests daylight best also tends to lose the most heat through the same elements.
Most school estates are not one building. They are a Victorian block, a 1970s teaching block, a recent sports hall and a collection of temporary classrooms, each with a different rating and a different cheapest measure.
Treating the estate as one project produces a compromise specification that suits none of it. The useful first piece of work is a building-by-building schedule, which is the same conclusion as a multi-let estate for entirely different reasons.
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