Woodmill and St Columba’s RC High School wins Sustainability Project of the Year

For our team at AHR, our client Fife Council and the wider project team, this award is a fantastic recognition of a shared achievement. It celebrates an exceptional project in both its scale and impact: a school designed around the needs of its community, with first-year results that demonstrate the value of its sustainable approach.

Designed to make a difference every day

The 26,666 m² campus brings Woodmill High School and St Columba’s RC High School together in one building, while allowing each school to operate separately and retain its own identity. It provides a learning environment for 2,450 pupils and staff, with spaces designed to support comfort, wellbeing and different ways of learning.

Sustainability shaped the design from the outset. Working to Passivhaus standards and the Scottish Futures Trust’s Energy in Use requirements, our team focused on delivering a high performance building fabric, with insulation, airtightness and glazing helping to retain heat and keep temperatures comfortable.

This approach is reflected in the building’s airtightness performance, achieving 0.45 air changes per hour (ACH), comfortably below the Passivhaus requirement of 0.6 ACH. Together with high performance insulation and triple glazing, this helps reduce heat loss while allowing natural light into the school. Carefully designed solar shading supports comfort throughout the year.

The results are already clear. In its first year, the school used 48% less energy and reduced energy bills by £433,392. It is also performing around 20% better than its original energy performance target.

For the people who use the school every day, this means cleaner air and a more consistent level of comfort. For Fife Council, lower energy use brings meaningful savings and long-term value.

A welcoming place for learning and community

The project’s success is about more than operational performance. AHR’s architecture, landscape, interior and Passivhaus teams worked together to create a welcoming environment, with bright shared spaces, flexible places to learn and areas that bring the two school communities together.

Outside, planting supports biodiversity, while outdoor learning spaces and sensory gardens connect pupils and the wider community with nature. The building has been designed to support school life now, while offering the flexibility to serve the community over time.

The award celebrates the collective effort behind the project, from Fife Council and AHR’s multidisciplinary team to everyone involved in its delivery. Its performance shows that a school can be ambitious in scale and design while also being practical, comfortable and exceptionally efficient.

Congratulations to Fife Council and all those who helped bring Woodmill and St Columba’s RC High School to life. This is a landmark project for the community and a proud achievement for all involved. 

Discover more about how we brought sustainable design and welcoming learning spaces together at Woodmill and St Columba’s RC High School on the project page.