Polln was commissioned by London South Bank Colleges to design a short, intensive introduction to retrofit: three days of campus-based learning, with an optional fourth day enabling learners to deepen their knowledge and prepare for the City & Guilds Level 2 Award in Retrofit.

Retrofit is a little-understood emerging sector. The subject can get technical, fast. But on a course like this, learners can also arrive with vastly different experiences of education, construction, energy and climate change. So rather than starting with the curriculum, we started with the people navigating it - building the course around three important principles.

A place-based demonstrator in Merton to evaluate barriers to uptake of ECO4 in Greater London, in collaboration with the Greater London Authority, the London Borough of Merton and London South Bank University. A series of workshops engaging community stakeholders revealed how ECO4 -- the Energy Obligation Funding grant to fund retrofit in low income households- has the potential to radically transform the lives, health and wellbeing of Londoners - but in its current format. The result was a reimagining of ECO4 and the service ethos needed to help Londoners poorest to get ‘retrofit ready’, and a suite of recommendations at national, regional and hyper-local level.

As Co-Chair of the National Retrofit Hub’s Workforce Growth & Skills Development Working Group, Pippa Palmer (Polln) helped lead sector-wide systems analysis, research and consultations, with findings distilled into 10 succinct policy asks. These resulted in a collaborative publication - Policy Recommendations for National Retrofit Workforce Strategy - setting out the scale of the task, the opportunity for jobs and economic growth, and the urgent actions needed across industry, education, and government.