Innovation Exchange Challenge: DfE + Innovate UK Pre-demolition Data Capture and Analysis

The education estate comprises approximately 69,000 buildings across more than 22,000 schools and colleges in England. It includes a range of construction types and structural components, many of which are concealed while buildings are in use.

DfE continuously seeks to improve its understanding of construction materials and structural arrangements used in school and college buildings. This is essential as these buildings age, have increasing maintenance requirements and will be impacted by climate change. DfE uses this knowledge to prioritise investment in the estate, inform policy and project-specific decisions,and ensure interventions such as retrofit, renewal or rebuilding are appropriately targeted. It also supports the review and development of reliable and proportionate guidance for those responsible for operating educational buildings.

Buildings due for demolition through the Schools Rebuilding Programme (SRP) offer a rich source of informationas they are typically included in the programme because of safety issues or severe condition need, including structural defects. Immediately prior to demolition, finishes and fixtures are often removed as part of the ‘softstrip’, exposing large areas of the load bearing structure that would normally remain concealed in an operational school because of the disruption of intrusive investigations. At present there is no systematic programme to capture and analyse information on the final structural condition of these buildings.

This challenge seeks to establish a way to do this with minimal impact to the cost and programme of project delivery.

Further information on the School Rebuilding Programme (SRP) can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-rebuilding-programme

The Challenge

Through Innovate UK, DfE are seeking scalable and cost-effective digital tools and methodologies to capture structural condition data immediately before demolition and analyse it to identify trends in defects across different construction types and structural arrangements in the education estate. This may be answered as discrete or a complete solution: 1: Data capturing and interpretation and 2: Analysis to identify trends across different construction types and structural arrangements.

Applicants shall demonstrate how their proposals can capture structural condition data during a short pre-demolition window and analyse it to give reliable, engineering-based insights into structural defects, deterioration patterns and structural risks.

Challenge responses should explain how data will be captured efficiently and safely and how technologies or automated methodologies, will be used to interpret it and then analyse it to inform the overall structural condition. Successful data capture and interpretation will be able to identify the different deterioration that can occur for the various structural elements and materials used for historic school construction. Successful analysis approaches should be capable of identifying common patterns or trends in visible defects and signs of deterioration across different buildings and correlate these to the construction materials and structural systems present. Responses should also explain the interoperability between data capture and analysis tools and how data and analysis outputs can be ingested into DfE’s Common Data Environment (CDE).

The typical range of material systems used for structural elements is:

- Structural steel (welded, bolted, rivetted)

- Structural timber, including trusses

- Reinforced concrete (Excluding RAAC, reinforced aerated autoclaved concrete, which will have been captured by separate pre-assessment)

- Masonry (brickwork and blockwork), solid or cavity with wall ties.

The range of structural elements is expected to include but may not be limited to:

- Ground slabs: Reinforced concrete

- Columns and beams and stabilising elements (braces): Steel, Reinforced concrete, masonry, timber

- Roof Framing (trusses and lattices): Steel, timber

- Suspended floors and flat roofs: Reinforced concrete, beams and decking (such as floor boards), reinforced concrete beam, concrete block infill, precast concrete and proprietary panels

- Loadbearing walls: Masonry

- Chimneys: masonry, reinforced concrete

It is expected that some degradation types will be common to all materials:

- Water ingress effects, settling/movement of foundations or supports, movement from the as-built condition, workmanship issues from the time of construction.

- Unplanned structural alterations or mechanical damage through the building’s life such as cutting of members, removal of braces, removal of bolts, accidental impact etc

The typical deterioration of the differing materials can include:

- Timber: Wood boring insects, dry rot, wet rot, crushing, splitting, warping

- Steelwork: Corrosion, compression buckling, buckling over supports

- Reinforced concrete: Corrosion of rebar, spalling of surfaces, cracking, crumbling, contamination

- Masonry: Crumbling and spalling of faces, corrosion of cavity wall ties, cracking in bedding joints, cracking in bricks/blocks, erosion of mortar bedding joints

Timescales

Launch of the Challenge Statement: Friday 23rd October 2026

Deadline for respondents: Friday 4th December 2026

Shortlisted applicants will be notified: Tuesday 5th January 2027

Challenge pitch day for shortlisted applicants: 11th to 15th January 2027

Shortlisted applicants notified of the pitch result: Tuesday 2nd February 2027

Subject to DfE commercial procurement processes and budget availability, successful applicant(s) may be invited to pilot their solution(s) in live SRP settings. Adoption of successfully pilot solutions on future projects, where appropriate,will be subject to funding availability, relevant DfE approvals and compliant process.

Following successful outcomes of the challenge, the pilot study is planned for summer 2027, aligning with typical construction programmes and intensive pre-demolition activities during this period while SRP school sites are largely unoccupied.

The longer-term commercial opportunity is that, in the future, this may be adopted on the several hundred education buildings that are demolished every year, where is it appropriate based on a building's characteristics and project specific constraints.