Specialist solar panels for schools in Stratford-upon-Avon
National Grid Electricity Distribution runs the network around Stratford-upon-Avon, and on a school site their answer on export shapes the design as much as the roof pitch does. We look at the roof, the switchboard and the timetable in that order, then set the array size against what the site draws in term time.
25.8% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 893 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 470 kWp, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Stratford-upon-Avon- 1 teaching block
- 2 hall and kitchen
- 3 sports hall
- 4 1960s block, no array
- first phase
- later phase
Illustrative layout for an estate of this size. The array is drawn at about 345 kWp, roughly 53 percent of the 650 kWp these three roofs would hold, because a school sizes to the load it can use in term time rather than to the roof it has: generation it cannot use is exported at a much lower rate than it pays to import. The hatched block carries no array because its structure has not been assessed, which on a school of that era is the usual starting point rather than an exception. Your own figures, and which of your blocks can take an array, come from the roof survey.
School rooftop solar across Warwickshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Stratford-upon-Avon models at 893 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,143 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is within a few percent of our mean. Latitude is not the variable here. When the building is occupied is.
Scaled up, a 470 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 15 miles away at Solihull, models at about 419,700 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,396 square metres of clear roof. We take the size from the nearest real application rather than a round number, so the example is anchored to something a planning officer has already seen.
Spread across the year that is about 108,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 21,000 kWh across December and January. National Grid Electricity Distribution sets what may go back onto the network here, so the July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Stratford-upon-Avon ranks 1 of 7 towns we cover in Warwickshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 866 to 893, a spread of 27 kWh per kWp. Within Warwickshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
What the planning record shows around Stratford-upon-Avon
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the CV37 postcode district. Read that as a gap in the record, not a gap in the roofs: the database is reliable above one megawatt and thin below it, and a school array is typically a fifth of a megawatt.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 15 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, at Solihull: 470 kWp at Tudor Grange, Solihull Dingle Lane - PV Solar Panels, applicant Tudor Grange Academy, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what West Midlands planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Stratford-upon-Avon school
25.8 percent of the annual output modelled for Stratford-upon-Avon arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. July is the single strongest month here at 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 5 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. The roof makes 6 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5 to one. 74 percent of the year arrives between April and September, and the point of that figure is not that the summer half goes unused, because April, May and June are full teaching months that draw hard. It is that the concentration peaks in the few weeks at the end of it when the building is shut.
Put the two calendars together and roughly 49 percent of a school's generation nationally lands on a session day, against about 71 percent for a business open every weekday. That gap is the whole difference between appraising a school roof and appraising any other commercial one, and it barely moves from town to town.
Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Stratford-upon-Avon school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
None of that makes a Stratford-upon-Avon scheme a bad one. It changes what the scheme should be: sized against the base load that runs whether or not the school is open, which on most sites is servers, comms, catering refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, with lettings, holiday clubs and summer works added on top. Where that base load is thin, the choices are storage, an export arrangement through National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a smaller array that consumes nearly everything it makes.
We set out the full treatment of the school year against the generation curve on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.
- generated while the school is open
- generated at a weekend or in the holidays
The same figures as a table
| Month | Session days | Output, kWh per kWp | School open | School closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 20 | 24 | 15 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 102 | 41 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 120 | 66 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 125 | 44 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 106 | 0 | 106 |
| Sep | 20 | 82 | 55 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 50 | 27 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 29 | 20 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 895 | 435 | 460 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Warwickshire, so the export application goes to them. Anything larger than 3.68 kW per phase falls under G99, which means an application before commissioning rather than a notification afterwards. A constrained network is not the end of a scheme. Capping export costs little when the building already absorbs most of what the roof produces.
Across Warwickshire the planning database records 94 solar schemes totalling 1201 MW, of which 18 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
How many schools Stratford-on-Avon has
Stratford-on-Avon has 68 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 21,108 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 55 primary, 11 secondary and 2 special, at an average of 310 pupils a site. That is 5 primaries for every secondary, which is the ratio that matters for a roof: a primary of a few hundred pupils usually offers a hall roof and one teaching block, while a secondary site carries a sports hall, a dining block and several flat roofs.
If your trust holds several of them, the sequencing question comes before the sizing question. Roof age, covering type and the state of the incoming supply vary block by block across an estate, and that is normally what sets the order of works.
Start with the Stratford-upon-Avon roof
Roof condition decides the order of works on most school estates, so that is where we start. Send us the postcode and a rough roof area, with twelve months of half hourly readings if you have them, and we come back with usable area, modelled output against your own load, and the funding routes.
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges the survey and passes your details to an MCS-certified installation partner so they can quote. We do not carry out the installation ourselves.
Questions governors ask us about Stratford-upon-Avon schools
- How much would a school roof near Stratford-upon-Avon generate?
- Modelled at 893 kWh per kWp a year, a 470 kWp array on a Stratford-upon-Avon school models at about 419,700 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Stratford-upon-Avon?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Stratford-upon-Avon generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Stratford-upon-Avon school?
- Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Warwickshire. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
- What does Stratford-on-Avon require for solar on a school building?
- Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Stratford-on-Avon on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Stratford-on-Avon before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Stratford-upon-Avon?
- Stratford-on-Avon has 68 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 21,108 pupils on roll. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools. We survey across the whole of that area, and where a trust holds several sites we look at them in one pass.