Energy saving in UK FE colleges: The relative importance of the socio-economic groups and environmental attitudes of employees

Sustainable development within the educational sector provides an important opportunity to conserve energy and resources. However, much of the current debate on energy efficiency focuses on new builds or technical measures to adapt established premises; the potential to harness the energy saving behaviour of employees is neglected. Previous research has shown that within the domestic environment, participants' socio-economic characteristics and environmental attitudes are strongly linked to their propensity to make energy savings and promote energy conservation. The objectives of this research are to examine whether these same principles could be applied to a business environment, in particular the educational sector. This research focused on staff at a typical college of further education in the UK. Two questionnaires were used as the most appropriate research tool for this investigation. This analysis is based on data from 330 employees at a Further Educational College in Staffordshire. The results indicate that energy saving behaviour is important across a wide sector of variables, with home owner status, social altruism and home installation of green measures determining people's views and opinions. Although the results have made positive correlation the analysis also exposed the need for a major change in the patterns of human behaviour towards environmentally sustainable alignment. Data from staff who did not want to take part in the surveys was also analysed for motivations and reasons. Recommendations were made for further study in this sector.