A plain English guide to how our state’s classrooms should sound
If you manage a school, you already live with acoustics every day, whether you call it that or not. The classroom that teachers avoid booking. The hall where every assembly address turns to mush. The staffroom where two conversations make a third impossible.
What most school leaders don’t know is that Australia has clear, published guidance on how these spaces should sound. Not vague suggestions, actual numbers, written down in standards that acousticians, architects and the Queensland Department of Education all work from.
This guide walks through the standards that matter for Queensland schools, translates them into plain English, and explains the part nobody tells you: what they mean for the classrooms your school already has.
The main Australian Standard: AS/NZS 2107:2016
The document that matters most is AS/NZS 2107:2016, Acoustics, Recommended design sound levels and reverberation times for building interiors. It is the reference acousticians use across Australia and New Zealand, and it covers education spaces in detail.
The standard deals with two things. First, how loud a space should be when it is doing nothing (which is the background noise from traffic, air conditioning, and the rest of the building). Second, how long sound should linger once it is made (which is reverberation time).
Recommended reverberation times for classrooms
For typical teaching spaces, AS/NZS 2107:2016 recommends a reverberation time of around 0.4 to 0.6 seconds. For spaces used by students with hearing difficulties, and for students learning English as an additional language or dialect, the guidance points to the lower end of that range, because these students have the most to lose when speech is unclear.
For context, many untreated Queensland classrooms have reverberation measuring a full second or more. School halls and multipurpose spaces routinely measure two seconds and beyond. The gap between what the standard recommends and what schools actually have is usually large – yet it is entirely closable.
Recommended background noise levels in schools
The standard also recommends design sound levels for teaching spaces, generally in the range of 35 to 45 decibels depending on the space type. In practice this covers things like keeping traffic noise out and keeping air conditioning quiet. This matters because background noise and reverberation join forces to gang up on speech. A reverberant room with a noisy air conditioner is doubly hard to teach in.
What the Queensland Department of Education requires
The Department of Education publishes design standards for Queensland state school facilities, and these include acoustic performance requirements that draw on AS/NZS 2107:2016 and the National Construction Code.
The departmental standards treat some spaces (including larger teaching rooms and any space using voice amplification) as acoustically important by default. They set requirements for wall and partition performance between teaching spaces, sound insulation from outside noise, and reverberation control within rooms.
Independent and Catholic schools are not bound by the departmental standards, but most architects working in education use them, along with AS/NZS 2107:2016, as the benchmark for any new school building in Queensland regardless of sector.
Where the National Construction Code fits
The National Construction Code contains acoustic provisions, but they are mostly aimed at sound transmission in residential buildings. For schools, the substance comes from AS/NZS 2107:2016 and the departmental design standards, which is why those two documents dominate any conversation about how Queensland classrooms should perform.
The practical takeaway for school leaders is simple: if a consultant or supplier talks about school acoustics, the benchmark they should be quoting is AS/NZS 2107:2016. And if they are not, ask why.
The catch with every acoustic standard
Here is the part that surprises most school business managers. These standards apply to the design of new buildings and major refurbishments. They do not reach back and apply to existing classrooms.
A classroom built in 1975, or 1995, or even 2015, was assessed against whatever standard applied at the time, which was often nothing much. There is no acoustic inspection regime for existing school buildings, no register of non-complying classrooms, and no requirement to upgrade.
This is why a school can have one beautiful new learning hub that meets every benchmark, sitting next to twenty classrooms that would fail the current standard by a wide margin. The standard is not wrong. It just was not there when most of your school was built.
For school leaders, this reframes the question. Compliance is not the issue for existing rooms. Performance is. The standards are best used not as a legal hurdle but as a target, because they describe the conditions under which students hear and learn well. A 1975 classroom brought to a 0.5 second reverberation time works just as well as a new one.
Why the numbers are set where they are
The 0.4 to 0.6 second range is not arbitrary. It comes from decades of research into speech intelligibility in classrooms.
Children process speech differently from adults. They need a cleaner signal, because they cannot yet fill in gaps from context the way adults do. Research consistently shows that in reverberant conditions, students miss more words, spend more effort listening, and tire faster. Students with any kind of hearing or language difficulty are affected most, which is exactly why the standard pushes those spaces to the lower end of the range.
Teachers benefit at the same numbers. In a room with a controlled reverberation time, a teacher can speak at a normal conversational level and be heard at the back. In a live room, they push their voices all day, which is why voice strain is so common in the profession.
How to find out where your school stands
You cannot manage what you have not measured. But the good news is that measuring is straightforward:
- Start with your staff. Teachers will tell you which rooms are hardest to work in, and their instincts are consistently accurate. Rank the complaints.
- Do the “clap test”. A single clap in an empty room tells you a lot. If the sound rings on rather than stopping dead, it’s a sign the reverberation time is long.
- Get an acoustic assessment. A proper assessment measures reverberation time and noise levels against AS/NZS 2107:2016 and tells you exactly how far off each space is. Avenue provide these for schools regularly, and they turn vague complaints into a clear, prioritised list.
Closing the school acoustics gap without a building program
Meeting the reverberation recommendations in an existing room is a matter of adding sound absorption – and it doesn’t require construction.
Calando acoustic ceiling tiles address the largest reflective surface in the room, and offer typically the single biggest improvement in a standard classroom. The Calando acoustic panel treats walls, with the back wall of the classroom usually the priority. Schools chasing sustainability goals often choose the ECO Wall acoustic panel, which pairs absorption with environmentally responsible materials, and the Custom Calando acoustic panel lets a school print artwork or school values onto the treatment itself.
For school halls and larger spaces, Calando acoustic timber provides absorption with a warm, architectural finish that suits stages, libraries, and front-of-house areas.
An acoustic assessment determines how much absorption each room needs to reach the recommended range. Installation is surface mounted, most classrooms are finished in under a day, and schools usually schedule the work in holiday periods.
School acoustic standards FAQs
Talk to Avenue about acoustic standards for your Queensland school
The acoustic standards for Queensland schools are clear and sensible, and they describe classrooms where students hear well and teachers do not wear out their voices. The limitation is reach. They shape new buildings and leave existing ones untouched, so that the rooms most likely to need help are the ones the standards never see.
The secret is to treat the standards as a target rather than a rule. Measure your rooms, find the gaps, and close the worst ones first. It’s one of the highest value improvements available to a school, and with more than 25 years of acoustic experience through the Flexshield Group behind us, it’s exactly the work Avenue Interior Systems was built for.
Trusted to help shape your brand through better sound. Call us on 1300 827 177.
Because at Avenue Interior Systems, we design your silence.
