Dubai, UAE: The awareness to provide healthy classrooms to children has been gathering more attention than before. The need for builders, design consultants and school administration to work together to bring the desired results is paramount. However, schools in the Middle East still have a long way to go in terms of implementation.

Dr Farooq A Wasil, CEO of Goldline Education, shares his views on how policies and enforcement strategies can drive change in the school premises. “There’s a lot of noise in schools about the need to protect the environment, and yet indoor threats are not recognised,” he says. “We need to engage school operators, to make them understand what the issue is all about and how they can drive change through operational procedures. We need to orient school leadership towards IEQ literacy, by having a programme for principals, for example.”

“In the same way administrators regulate schools, in teaching methodologies, competence of leadership,” he adds, “should also be partly evaluated according to one’s understanding of IEQ requirements in schools.”