HYPOCRITICAL adults are putting out misleading messages about climate change, says Plymouth school head Graham Browne.

Like all schools, Estover Community College turns the spotlight on the environment in subjects as varied as sciences and Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education.

The school itself is in the throes of replacing its environmentally unfriendly 1980s buildings with modern designs that have global warming firmly in their sights.

But, Mr Browne said yesterday: "The things we are doing, while they will help, will not solve the world's problems because the real problem is our lifestyle.

"Most cars – including mine this morning – still have one person in them.

"The way we live; the way we support ourselves in terms of people making things or providing services which need to be bought by somebody else, is the root cause of our global problems.

"A billion poor Chinese is a tragedy, but a billion rich Chinese each with their own car is a global calamity. But who are we to say that they can't have what we have.

"It bothers me that in telling children about insulation, we suggest that we are doing something about it. We are not. The problem is our Western lifestyle.

"When we move into our new school in September it will still have the same values.

"When I was a geography teacher in the 1980s we used to major on deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Where did it get us? People are still buying tropical hardwood.

"Young people see the hypocrisy in adults."

The £39.7million development by contractors Kier Western and Mitie will turn Estover Community College into a " lifelong learning campus", delivering facilities not only for the 1,300 pupils but for the whole community.

A modern biomass boiler will provide heating and hot water for the school, and deliver carbon savings of 75 to 80 per cent over a traditional system. The boiler will be fuelled by wood chips from local forests.

"This is the hub for what is almost the equivalent of a small town," Mr Browne said. "When it's up and running there will be about 1,800 people using these buildings.

"We wanted to put in solar panels and wind turbines but the money wasn't there."

The old school buildings, built of concrete block with a cavity, will be demolished over the next 18 months as their replacements come into use.

The walls of the new buildings are a complex sandwich of insulation, timber frames, cement board and plasterboard, and render.

Modern, double-glazed windows replace the old-fashioned single-glazed.

"The existing buildings were almost thrown up in the late 1970s and early 1980s," Mr Browne said.

"Schools then were based on an industrial model of learning. Very few people had realised that learning did not need to be based on the factory model."

When the original school was built the old adage, that children should be seen and not heard, still held sway. Not so today: student design teams had a big say in the planning stage of Estover's big development.

They said they wanted lots of natural light, lots of toilets and no corridors.

The message has been taken to heart. "Block C", which will eventually become the school for pupils with learning difficulties, is due to be completed in July.

The building is flooded with natural light from a light well in the roof. Even on a cloudy day, the workmen have no need for artificial lighting.

Gary McCoy of contractors Mitie said much of the new school would be double-storey, making it much more efficient than the single storey structure that now sprawls across the campus on Miller Way.

He said that about 60 per cent of heat loss from a building is through the roof.

This inefficiency racks up a huge bill for Estover, which pays about £1,000 a week for fuel.

The specialist art college will be a flagship for school development in Plymouth, but for Mr Browne the battle is only half won.

"I have been aware for 15 years of the alleged relationship between the degree of commitment to climate change and the source of research funding," he said.

"It's staggering the differences that there are across the world in what people perceive to be normal and desirable amounts of things to own.

"We have got a whole social structure which is based on having more and better than before. That is what is not sustainable.

"Our humanities department does a lot of work on levels of development around the globe, and yet I wonder how much is really absorbed."