Innovation Exchange Challenge: DfE + Innovate UK Pre-demolition Data Capture and Analysis

The education estate comprises approximately 69,000 buildings across more than 22,000 schools and colleges in England. It includes a range of construction types and structural components, many of which are concealed while buildings are in use. DfE continuously seeks to improve its understanding of construction materials and structural arrangements used in school and college buildings. This is essential as these buildings age, have increasing maintenance requirements and will be impacted by climate change. DfE uses this knowledge to prioritise investment in the estate, inform policy and project-specific decisions,and ensure interventions such as retrofit, renewal or rebuilding are appropriately targeted. It also supports the review and development of reliable and proportionate guidance for those responsible for operating educational buildings. Buildings due for demolition through the Schools Rebuilding Programme (SRP) offer a rich source of informationas they are typically included in the programme because of safety issues or severe condition need, including structural defects. Immediately prior to demolition, finishes and fixtures are often removed as part of the ‘softstrip’, exposing large areas of the load bearing structure that would normally remain concealed in an operational school because of the disruption of intrusive investigations. At present there is no systematic programme to capture and analyse information on the final structural condition of these buildings. This challenge seeks to establish a way to do this with minimal impact to the cost and programme of project delivery. Further information on the School Rebuilding Programme (SRP) can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-rebuilding-programme The Challenge Through Innovate UK, DfE are seeking scalable and cost-effective digital tools and methodologies to capture structural condition data immediately before demolition and analyse it to identify trends in defects across diffe