The Retrofit Academy CIC Responds to the Each Home Counts (Bonfield) Report
The Retrofit Academy CIC was set up to address the skills and knowledge gaps that were clearly and obviously impacting upon the quality of retrofit projects being delivered under the ECO and Green Deal. These gaps were largely the result of the failure of the educational establishment to incorporate retrofit in to their curriculum.
It is therefore very welcome that the Skills and Knowledge section of the Each Home Counts Report recommends that “knowledge and understanding of basic building physics, the holistic or whole property approach to assessing homes and effective interactions with customers are embedded in all relevant education, at all stages of retrofit”. This is long overdue.
To achieve this objective, the educational mainstream will need help. True expertise in retrofit is scarce, and The Academy’s policy only to engage with leading practitioners is long-established. It is the Academy’s hope that the bank of knowledge that has been created through our expert-led Retrofit Coordinator courses can now be used to ensure the immediate improvement of training at all levels. This is not a time for reinventing wheels, but for making the most of what we already have.
The Retrofit Academy CIC and our partners look forward to working closely with any certification bodies, education or training providers or professional institute who wish to make the required changes to their curriculum. This will build upon the initiatives that the Academy already has underway which tie in with the recommendations of the Report, including:
- The partnership with RIBA CPD to upskill architects to become Retrofit Coordinators
- The development of formal higher education qualifications developed in partnership with the University of Salford
- The collaboration with the AECB to support the development and roll out of the CarbonLite Retrofit e-learning programme
- Work with agencies in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland to expedite this process in the devolved nations.
Through these activities, and with the support of our partners, the AECB, Sustainable Homes, Matilda’s Planet, The Ecology Building Society, The Green Building Store, Parity Projects and the National Energy Foundation, we are well placed to support the market that we hope will now emerge for domestic retrofitting.
Any organisation wishing to discuss collaboration with The Retrofit Academy is welcome to contact us via [email protected], or me personally via LinkedIn.
If you are interested in reading the Each Home Counts Report in full, it can be downloaded from here. A helpful and accurate summary of the report has been published by Bevan Jones from our partner Sustainable Homes.
