CF25: Navigating the DfE’s New Era of Low-Carbon Delivery

England’s education estate is under growing pressure, with many ageing and deteriorating school buildings in urgent need of repair or renewal. Alongside this, stretched estates budgets continue to face pressure from demographic changes, rising operational costs, and growing demand for SEND provision.

At the same time, the sector faces a parallel challenge: how to renew and expand the education estate in a way that is environmentally responsible, economically viable and resilient over the long term. As embodied carbon, operational efficiency and whole-life performance become more central to public sector delivery, sustainability is no longer a separate ambition sitting alongside educational investment but an intrinsic metric of success.

It is within this context that the DfE’s Education Estates Strategy (EES) and the Construction Framework 2025 (CF25) represent an important and timely paradigm shift. Together, they signal a stronger emphasis on carbon reduction, long-term performance and greater consistency in how education environments are planned and delivered – moving the conversation beyond individual projects toward a more coordinated and systemised approach to the school estate as a whole.

For those involved in shaping and delivering educational environments, this creates an important opportunity not only to deliver lower-carbon schools, but also to rethink how educational environments are designed, procured and delivered more holistically. As the sector moves into this next phase of delivery, collaboration, alignment and repeatability are going to become increasingly important catalysts for achieving better long-term outcomes across the estate.

One of the most significant changes within the CF25 is the introduction of clearer, more structured expectations around embodied carbon. For the first time, carbon performance is being defined through set targets that become progressively more ambitious throughout the life of the framework, supported by more consistent requirements for measurement and reporting across the delivery process. This creates a clear trajectory for continuous improvement, requiring delivery teams to refine their approaches over time as expectations evolve.

This approach to defining carbon reduction requirements is a bold and significantly positive move by the Department for Education (DfE) as a public sector client body, leading the way, setting a definitive benchmark for procurement across the wider built environment.

Alongside the CF25, the wider direction of the EES reinforces this move with a greater emphasis on greener, data-led estate management. Estate performance, including energy use, operational efficiency and long-term condition, is increasingly expected to be reported at a more consistent level across the education estate. While this sits primarily with estates teams and clients, it has a clear downstream impact on how projects will be briefed, designed and delivered, with greater scrutiny on whole-life performance and operational outcomes from the outset.

Together, these changes are helping to cement the role of carbon not just as an ethical consideration, but as a measurable, reportable and non-negotiable component of project performance and value.

Prior to the introduction of the CF25, the DfE had already begun exploring many of these ideas through a small number of pathfinder schemes delivered under its Gen Zero programme. These projects have acted as important testbeds for the next generation of low-carbon schools, helping to explore the art of the possible within real delivery conditions – where sustainability ambitions must still respond to and balance fixed budgets, programme pressures, procurement requirements and long-term operational expectations.

Working on Northumberland College has allowed us to refine our approach ahead of this next phase of education delivery. Through direct engagement with the DfE’s evolving priorities, we have gained early experience of many of the design, coordination and operational considerations that are now becoming increasingly central under the CF25.

That experience has helped position us to respond proactively as expectations continue to evolve – not simply in meeting revised technical requirements, but in understanding how sustainability, standardisation, and long-term usability must work together within practical delivery conditions.

Importantly, as embodied carbon targets become progressively more ambitious throughout the life of the framework, these early lessons provide a valuable foundation for continuous improvement. By testing more ambitious carbon reduction strategies within live project environments today, we are better equipped to help contractors and clients prepare for the increasingly demanding performance expectations of tomorrow, identifying opportunities for further carbon reduction while maintaining certainty around programme, cost and educational outcomes.

Projects such as Northumberland College have demonstrated how impactful a coordinated approach can be in practice. When environmental ambitions are embedded early, and supported consistently across the wider project team, lower-carbon delivery becomes far more achievable within the realities of programme, cost, procurement and long-term operational requirements.

CF25 seeks to embed this same principle of alignment across the wider education estate. Alongside clearer environmental and performance expectations, the framework introduces a broader shift toward greater standardisation through expanded technical guidance and the consolidation of spatial arrangements within the Pattern Book, creating a more consistent foundation from which project teams can work.

Alignment is also reinforced through further mechanisms introduced on the CF25, such as scheme batching, earlier contractor engagement and more streamlined procurement routes – creating a more efficient delivery model that reduces duplication, accelerates decision-making and shortens the path from concept to construction.

In practice, these measures create the conditions to improve delivery certainty, support programme efficiency and enable more predictable outcomes at scale – accelerating the delivery of much-needed educational facilities to the communities they serve. However, perhaps one of the more interesting implications of this shift is what it could mean for innovation within the sector.

With clearer baseline solutions emerging through the CF25, there is a growing opportunity for innovation to be refocused in two key areas:

First, at the component level. Improving the performance of the materials, assemblies and building elements that make up school buildings, with a continued drive toward lower-carbon, higher-quality solutions.

Second, at the process level. Exploring how buildings are coordinated, procured and delivered in more efficient and repeatable ways, supported by more industrialised approaches and platform-based thinking.

This naturally aligns with the continued evolution of industrialised construction, where efficiency, quality and scalability are increasingly being enabled through more integrated delivery models.

It is also a direction we have long been engaged with through collaborative initiatives such as OSKOP, which explores how open and standardised approaches to timber panelised construction can help broaden access to lower-carbon building systems while supporting more consistent and compliant delivery across the supply chain.

Read more about OSKOP

As the CF25 embeds greater consistency and coordination across education delivery, the focus will increasingly shift to how the industry responds – with platforms such as OSKOP, alongside other process and systems innovations being explored by various main contractors, helping to turn this greater alignment into practical delivery outcomes at scale, supporting lower-carbon schools that are more affordable and repeatable.

However, delivering this next generation of high-performance schools is about far more than carbon alone.

Alongside environmental performance, emerging policy direction places growing emphasis on inclusion, adaptability and the ability of school environments to respond to changing educational needs. The EES brings a renewed focus on SEND provision, supported by £3.7bn of investment for 60,000 new specialist places, inclusion bases and integrated support areas within mainstream education settings.

This shift carries important implications for design. Future school environments will increasingly need to support a broader range of learning, sensory and wellbeing needs, requiring greater flexibility, thoughtful adjacencies, calm breakout spaces and environments that better bridge specialist and mainstream provision.

News: Creating SEN Environments – Ensuring Successful Outcomes and Maximising Value

Landscape is set to play an increasingly important role. In all new school designs outdoor environments are no longer a secondary layer, but an active part of the learning and support infrastructure. As its role in schools provision and the impact on student wellbeing becomes more widely recognised, the emphasis placed on landscape quality within CF25 reflects a broader understanding that external spaces are integral to how schools function, not separate from them.

Importantly, landscape also offers a key opportunity for maintaining adaptability and a more human, personalised quality within an otherwise increasingly standardised approach to school design. While internal building layouts may become more consistent under CF25, external spaces can introduce variation, flexibility and responsiveness – helping schools better reflect their setting, support different patterns of use, and remain legible and welcoming for communities.

Alongside this, the EES places increasing importance on long-term estates stewardship. This represents a shift away from a purely capital delivery mindset toward a more holistic view of how education environments are managed, maintained and adapted over time.

As school estates become more complex and expectations around performance continue to evolve, whole-life thinking is becoming increasingly critical – balancing operational efficiency, adaptability and long-term value alongside initial delivery outcomes.

Recognising this direction of travel, our Strategic Estates team continues to evolve alongside the sector. Building on decades of experience developing education estate strategies and masterplans across the UK, including for Manchester College, Loughborough College and Bradford College, the team has expanded its strategic offer to help clients respond to the changing priorities set out through CF25 and the EES.

As this new approach becomes embedded across the sector, keeping pace with these changing expectations will be essential. More than a shift in policy, it reflects a determination to break the cycle of reactive investment that has contributed to today’s ageing estate. Delivering that ambition will require a more joined-up approach across the built environment, bringing together strategic estate planning, design and delivery around a shared objective: creating education environments that continue to serve learners, staff and communities long after construction is complete.

The success of CF25 will depend on the industry’s ability to align around more coordinated, repeatable and whole-life approaches to delivery– bringing together clients, designers, contractors, manufacturers and estates teams around shared performance goals from the outset.

Frameworks such as CF25 create the conditions for this shift, but meaningful change will ultimately rely on how effectively the sector can translate policy ambition into practical delivery at pace. That means continuing to test new delivery models, embracing collaborative innovation and sharing lessons across the supply chain to improve consistency, quality and long-term performance at scale.

Through projects such as Northumberland College, and collaborative initiatives including OSKOP, we are already seeing how more integrated approaches to design, manufacturing and delivery can help support a more resilient, adaptable and lower-carbon education estate.

As we move forward under the EES and the CF25, we see a significant opportunity not only to support the renewal of the education estate, but to help shape more connected and future-ready models of delivery for the sector as a whole.