The City Hall cash will cover upgrades like insulation works, solar panels and heat pumps, reports Noah Vickers, Local Democracy Reporter

Sadiq Khan has launched a £2m programme aimed at slashing schools’ carbon emissions and energy bills.

Promised in the mayor’s election manifesto earlier this year, the ‘greener schools’ pilot scheme will enable boroughs to apply for funding to become “more energy efficient and resilient to the impacts of climate change”.

It will cover upgrades like insulation works, solar panels and heat pumps.

“The idea is that we work with boroughs, who will match fund the £2m, so it becomes £4m,” Khan told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), adding that he expected to see “dozens” of schools benefit from the pilot programme.

According to City Hall, the pilot will be “scalable” and “could be rolled out nationally to benefit more children and schools across the country”. If all of London’s schools were to use energy saving interventions, the mayor’s team claimed that this could save over £50m annually from the capital’s education budget.

Khan said the number of schools who benefit will depend on the amount of grant funding individual schools ask for.

“School A may want a heat pump, school B may want insulation, school C may want lower-energy lights, “ he said.

“The idea is to see which targeted interventions are the most effective, and which are the most scalable […] and then we’re going to go to the government and say, ‘We know this is one of your missions, we know this is a priority for the government. We’ve got an evidence base which shows this investment leads to not just less carbon, but smaller bills, which can be used for education, staff, equipment, books and so forth.’

“That will hopefully encourage the government to roll this out [nationwide] so I’m hoping that both [Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary] Ed Miliband and [Education Secretary] Bridget Phillipson will be looking at our pilot with keen interest.”

Boroughs will each be able to apply for a maximum of £500,000, and the mayor launched the scheme on a visit to Avondale Park Primary School in North Kensington.

“What we’ve seen from this school is that they’ve already started to see savings, and their heat pump only went in a few weeks ago,” Khan said.

The mayor also committed in his manifesto to “piloting air pollution filters in primary schools and exploring rolling them out city-wide”.

Asked whether those plans had made any progress, he told the LDRS: “We’ll be making announcements in the new year, in relation to our plans to encourage schools – rather than boroughs – to apply for these indoor air quality filtration systems.”

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