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Comment by AlbertoGP | Hacker News Reader

This might be one of the good things to come out of the pandemic if it stays as it would improve the kids’ attention and mental performance.

The article mentions that in passing: “As well as being a good ‘proxy’ for ventilation, lower CO2 levels have been linked to improved learning outcomes and better cogitative performance.”

I’d rather have fixed sensors so that they would stay, but these are portable and I imagine most will be left in a drawer after the pandemic goes away: «The portability of the CO2 monitors, supplied by the Department for Education (DfE), means schools can move them around to test different areas, starting with those they suspect may be poorly ventilated.»

At least the air cleaners might stay («distributing between 7,000 and 8,000 air cleaning units.») and I hope the CO₂ monitors will keep being used once people see the difference.

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7 or 8 thousand air cleaning units is a bit pointless, though, given that there are over 32,000 schools.

Presumably, 300,000 CO2 monitors is in the right range for one per classroom? Is ten classrooms per school a reasonable average?

> Is ten classrooms per school a reasonable average?

That sounds low: a secondary school with no sixth-form will have students in 5 different year groups, and will typically have more than two classes per year group.

But most schools are primary schools

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-sta...

Headcount 8,911,853 Number of schools 24,413 Average class size 26.6

So 335000 classes

that's just England, which is 83% of uk, so 402000 classes total

There are 8,911,853 pupils in England alone with an average class size of 26.6

That's 335,032 classes, and thus at least 335k classrooms (add extra ones for specialist classrooms)

However that number includes private schools. Remove those and you're looking at 8.3 million, with a larger class size, so potentially just 277k classes assuming 30 people per room (plus specialist classrooms like IT, Art, D+T, PE, etc)

It’s not clear from the press release whether this is a UK rollout or just in England- I suspect the latter - at last count there were 302 thousand classes in English schools, so this number makes sense.

But maybe they were for the ones where they're use was (particularly) not pointless? I.e. those with consistent high readings, with simple measures like opening windows not helping (or for some reason not being practical).

It would make more sense to me to send 7-8k of them to say London schools than 20k to country schools.

Seems a bit tough to ever make them practical without central AC though, which is not common (nor any AC) in the UK.

One interview I heard called it 'gesture politics'. Sadly, I think that assessment is on the money. It's just not plausible that there are only 7k classrooms in the UK that have bad ventilation.

I think it's the deep malaise of UK politics that they just hate spending money on anything, even if it will save far more money in the future. It's why the UK has the GDP-per-capita of Japan, but mostly looks like Serbia.

I've visited a lot of new UK schools over the last few years and fixed CO2 monitors are in almost every classroom everywhere I visit, even pre COVID. I assume it's a DfE requirement now.

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