EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES
PICKING THE RIGHT PARTNERSHIPS
Universities in the UK have faced growing economic pressure in the last few years; as they battle it out to attract students and additional income, the competition to provide better facilities increases, Greg O Brien, Operations Director AM Services Group explains.
Driven by the need to invest in estates, the sector continues to improve its premises to attract and retain high quality staff and to increase the student intake through desirable, high-quality facilities. Facilities are ranked by students in annual satisfaction surveys while the academic institutions provide anything from state- of-the-art study, social, residential and catering spaces, many of which are available as a round-the-clock service, to professional-sized theatres, sports performance centres, nurseries, and radio and news studios.
A management report by the Association of University Directors of Estates (AUDE) in 2016 revealed that, in the 2014/15 academic year, capital expenditure grew by 5.6% to a record high of £2.75 billion per annum across universities in the UK, while the university sector maintenance costs amounted to £2billion per year.
The university estate is becoming ever-more challenging to maintain; the AUDE report states that the average university estate covers 1.3 million square metres – more that 170 times more space than the Shard – which is an increase of 200 thousand square metres from the previous year.
46 | TOMORROW’S FM
The UK has some of the most historic and renowned universities in the world, with Oxford and Cambridge universities founded around the beginning of the 13th Century, to newer universities such as Lancaster, which was built in the mid 1960s.
Though the type of maintenance challenge may be different in old and new facilities, driving efficiency, reducing costs, improving the estate, raising service levels and increasing the commercial income from the estate, remain key focus areas for estate directors. University halls, lecture theatres, conference centres and catering facilities must be maintained through an ongoing reactive and proactive management plan that ensures that the facilities are maintained to a suitably high level, providing a clean, safe, and pleasant environment for students, which positively contributes to their wellbeing with minimal disruption to them, the staff and visitors.
The academic holiday periods, and especially the extended summer holiday, therefore provide an ideal time to carry out refurbishment tasks and scheduled deep cleaning programmes that cannot be carried out during the busy
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