With increasing strains on resources and budgets, managing your school estate effectively will not only save you money but ensure you have a healthy, safe, and sustainable school environment for all.
School buildings are an essential and valuable long-term asset that may also be open to the public as community facilities. So, maintaining your buildings so they are safe, warm, and weatherproof, and provide a suitable teaching and learning environment is vital. That’s where good estate management comes in.
With clear stewardship and maintenance plans for all your school estate buildings, you can ensure the value of these assets is protected. Poor or intermittent maintenance of your school buildings can lead to adverse effects on the provision of education, closure of buildings and invalidation of insurance, to name just a few.
This good estates management for schools guide delves into the following key topics:
What are the fundamentals of Good Estate Management For Schools (GEMS)
What are the benefits of strategic estate management?
What factors influence how you manage your school estate?
How good is your school’s current approach to estate management?
What are the top 10 estate management questions for governing boards?
How to prioritise and manage school estate projects
How to begin estate performance management in your school
The 'Good estate management for schools' guide from the Department for Education advises on how to effectively maintain your school estate as well as plan new estate projects. The guide covers all the important policies, processes and documents your school should aim to have in place.
But what are the fundamentals of Good Estate Management For Schools?
1. Take a strategic management approach to school estate managementBy thinking strategically about your school estate, you can ensure it supports your school’s educational needs and goals. It’s most effective when it involves your whole organisation and is coordinated and integrated with your school business planning process.
You can strategically manage your estate whatever your organisation type or estate size including single stand-alone schools, multi-academy trusts (MATs) and local authorities.
Strategic estate management will help you to make decisions that are supported by evidence, use your resources more efficiently and maximise your school estate’s value. So, it’s a bit of a no-brainer!
To support the strategic management of your estate the following documents are super important:
Estate vision: This sets your ambition for the estate in 5-10 years, so your long-term aim.
Estate strategy: This next layer delves deeper into how over the next 3-5 years you’ll carry out your estate vision. The strategy will identify projected funding for estate development, and outline anticipated outcomes and improvements to deliver your education strategy. This will all need to be signed off by your board and reviewed alongside your estate vision.
Asset Management Plan: This is where you get into the nitty-gritty. It’s your working document that will inform day-to-day operations on your estate. It should cover the short to medium term (up to 2 years) and again be signed off by your board and aligned with your estate vision and strategy.
Strategic review process: This is a structured process that will help you develop your Asset Management Plan, understand whether your estate is meeting your needs, how well your estate is performing and your options for the future.
To support your school estate management you should have agreed and documented processes and procedures in place that cover the whole estate and include:
Governance: You should have clear governance processes to support your estate. They should explain accountability for the estate at a board level and who is responsible at school level. Governance will support and enable strategic decision-making about your school estate including arrangements to ensure that statutory and other necessary estate activities are carried out.
Budget and finance: You should have a 3-5 year budget plan for your school estate, signed off by your board. This should include a prioritised maintenance plan, how you will achieve value for money through investment and actual and potential funding sources. Your budget plan should be included in your estate strategy.
Buying goods, works and services: You should have defined and transparent procedures that include how to engage professional advisers to design, price, manage and deliver property-related projects, purchasing arrangements for capital and revenue expenditure and how to achieve value for money through procurement.
Emergency planning: Your emergency planning should include formal procedures for responding to emergencies that affect the use of the estate. These procedures should be linked to an estate risk assessment which has considered possible estate emergency scenarios.
To manage your school estate effectively, you will need a variety of information and by having the relevant policies and procedures in place you can ensure you’re gathering the right information when you need it. The core information you need to hand includes:
Information about your estate: This is the foundation of school estate management. It needs to be accessible and stored securely.
Condition: Understanding the condition of your school estate will help you make informed decisions and inform the maintenance plan and estate budget.
Suitability and sufficiency: Understanding your school estate’s suitability and sufficiency will help you make strategic decisions.
Tenure and land ownership: You will need a complete understanding of land ownership, rights, and obligations.
Acquisitions and disposals: You will need a variety of information when dealing with acquisitions and disposals including the process for making and seeking approval for acquisitions and disposals decisions and understanding necessary tenure and land ownership approvals and implications.
Performance management of the school estate: You should have an agreed approach to performance management for assets across your school estate. This should include a consistent approach to the measurement of property-related performance and how this information will be used to improve performance.
Managing and reducing your energy and water usage: You should have a consistent and challenging approach to monitoring and managing energy and water use, reducing energy and water use and maximising energy efficiency in buildings.
Manage your estate and budget: Your plan should include a prioritised programme of maintenance projects based on statutory responsibilities and condition data.
A key part of school estate management is health and safety, and you need policies and processes in place to support this, including:
Health and safety: Documented safety procedures should include defined and understood responsibilities for the safety and security of staff, pupils and visitors, and accountability at board level.
Statutory compliance: Compliance procedures should include a complete understanding of your statutory compliance requirements.
A consistent approach to planning and delivering the range of different school estate projects is fundamental to good estate management. This includes:
Planning and prioritisation: You should have transparent processes for identifying, defining, appraising and prioritising projects with clear responsibilities for those involved with investment and expenditure decisions.
Project delivery: You should have a strong approach to project delivery, including managing contract performance and evaluating the outcomes of investment.
Taking a strategic approach to your school estate management will have a positive impact on your organisation across a range of areas including:
As the saying goes, ‘prevention is better than cure’ and that’s definitely the case when it comes to estate management. Some studies show that over a 30-year period, the operational costs for a build can be 5-10 times as much as the initial capital cost.
So, focusing on reducing running costs and ensuring you’re getting the best deals to spread the costs by procuring efficiently, scheduling repairs, and planning ahead are super important.
If your school estate is well-managed it will help you make better investment decisions as you can prioritise investments and get value for money from your capital spend.
Planning your maintenance needs will help with prioritising them effectively, which is better for your budget, can prevent unexpected repair costs, and minimise disruption to teaching and learning.
It’s no huge surprise that poorly maintained buildings increase the risk of accidents and potential liabilities. With good estate management, you can keep on top of your statutory responsibilities to ensure your estate is safe and compliant.
Safe, appealing, and maintained learning and teaching environments are also better for staff and pupil well-being and progress. Teacher retention is likely to be negatively impacted if their working environment isn’t up to scratch.
Well-designed and maintained facilities can also be linked to levels of attainment and will give a good impression of the school and its ethos to parents, students, staff and visiting officials so it’s a win-win!
Good energy and water management can save you 10-30% on energy and water bills for your school, as well as of course being better for the environment.
Adopting sustainable and efficient habits across your school estate will also increase environmental awareness amongst your pupils and staff team which has a positive outcome all around.
Many factors will influence how you manage your school estate, including:
Size, location, age and condition of buildings and land in the estate
Land ownership, tenure, and constraints
How effectively current facilities meet the specific educational needs of the school
The type, size, and nature of the body responsible for the school
Available funding and the future aspirations for the estate
Area-based considerations of the need for places or spare capacity in the system
The terms of your funding arrangements
Knowing how well your school’s current approach is working, where you’re following good practice and which areas could do with some development is key to good estate management.
Gov.uk offer a great self-assessment tool that allows you to assess your school’s current approach to estate management.
Whether you’re a headteacher, executive leader or member of the governing board, or someone with direct estate responsibilities the assessment is great for highlighting areas that need further development and it can also help with sharing of knowledge and understanding of the critical areas.
Covering 12 areas of estate management including strategic estate documents, governance, budgeting, emergency planning, and health and safety, it will help you develop a practical action plan.
Your governing board play an important role in good estate management. Your board needs to be confident that the school premises are safe and suitable.
The 10 checks below identify the most important issues around school property and premises. They can be used as a checklist to make sure that land and buildings are managed effectively and efficiently.
Are we managing the estate effectively?
Who is responsible for the estate?
Do we have the necessary skills, knowledge, and capacity to manage the estate?
How do we manage the estate?
What is the condition of the buildings?
Are we complying with our legal responsibilities?
What do we do in emergencies?
What funding is available for investment in the estate?
Are we spending wisely on the estate?
Can we become more effective with our expenditure?
You’re likely to have a schedule of identified maintenance projects that you may not have the resources or budget to undertake in full or straight away, so it’s important to know how best to prioritise these.
It’s best to start with an assessment of the condition of your estate along with risks and other factors that you consider important. You can then use this information to determine the maintenance priorities within your available budget or to inform budget planning.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get started with performance management:
This critical first step involves discussing, agreeing, and prioritising the measures that are more important to your school with your board. You should aim for about 5-6 measures that cover a range of areas whether that’s financial, or environmental, to improve the condition and safety of the school’s estate or to inform strategic planning.
You’ll need a lot of information about your estate to produce meaningful performance measures. So, think about how simple it is to access this information and what tools you’ll need for analysis.
Establish the baseline performance against the selected measures
Develop a standardised reporting framework including periodic reporting to the board
If you have a number of buildings in your estate, you should compare the performance of different buildings – this will help you identify poor performance, and opportunities for improvement and inform your strategic planning
Use how you perform against your targets to set new estate priorities
Refine your measures over time where your priorities change or your approach matures
Consider benchmarking with other schools once you’ve established your measures and have ready access to the data you need. Looking outside your own school can help with identifying opportunities to improve your own school’s performance.
Keeping on top of your estate can be a daunting task. It’s confusing and time-consuming to collate paperwork and spreadsheets about all the things that require fixing or updating. Thankfully, the iAM Compliant Good Estates Management tool is here to help.
Using the existing data from your iAM account, the tool brings together all the useful data you need into one place, regardless of how many rooms or buildings are in your estate. Maintenance makes up just one element of managing your school’s estate because all fixtures and fittings require updates and repairs over time.
Step away from inefficient spreadsheets and paperwork, you don’t need them anymore. iAM Compliant assists you in each aspect of maintaining your premises and estates.
Want to see if iAM Compliant is right for your school? Book a quick no-obligation demo with the team to discuss your particular needs.