FEATURE FOCUS: SCHOOL MAINTENANCE & DESIGN
Working smarter for smooth school refurbishments R
efurbishments are an essential part of providing pupils and teachers with the
facilities they need, but delivering them successfully is a unique challenge. In our second look at school maintenance and refurbishment this month, Phillip Cuthbertson, of property maintenance specialist Novus, explains how the process can be streamlined to ensure satisfaction all round. The link between the quality of school
buildings and the performance of pupils is well documented and broadly accepted. A study carried out at Georgetown University in
Washington DC showed that, when other variables are removed, such as students’ economic status, standardised achievement scores rose by 5.5% as a school’s physical environment improved from one design category to the next – for example, from ‘poor’ to ‘fair’. If a school improved its condition from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’ an average increase of 10.9% was observed. However, with budgets available to schools
more limited than has been the case for many years, maintaining high standards in facilities is a significant challenge. It is also often not feasible to move a school
with poor facilities to a new home on a different site and sell off the existing building because of the constraints of Local Authority land ownership. For these reasons, refurbishment of schools’
estates plays a critical role in keeping facilities fit for purpose. This is a priority that is recognised by the
government and, in March this year, the Condition Improvement Fund 2018 to 2019 was announced, making more than £500 million available to improve and expand nearly 1,300 schools. To maximise the impact of this funding,
delivering excellent refurbishment projects in schools in a cost-effective way is paramount, and ensuring they are delivered smoothly and without unexpected hiccups is key.
It’s all in the planning School buildings can pose some particular problems when it comes to refurbishment, and not just in terms of the need to work around busy academic schedules. Many school buildings need to be treated with
great sensitivity when designing and delivering refurbishments. Most Local Authorities in the UK will have school buildings that are of historic
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importance, whether they are listed, located in a conservation area or just cherished by the local community. Where these buildings are concerned, great care must be taken to ensure compliance with building codes, and careful planning is needed to ensure affordability of the project in light of any special requirements. Education estates are also often complex,
consisting of elements built during different periods with different construction methods. Those built in the 1960s and 1970s are especially widespread, and most of these feature extensive use of asbestos, a material that poses a major health risk if disturbed during refurbishment works and which needs to be disposed of by qualified specialists. But, however complex a building is and
whether or not it is of historical interest, it is vital that the projects are carefully planned in consultation with all stakeholders, including not only school governors, academic leaders and other staff. The majority of school refurbishment work
takes place during the academic summer holidays, which provide an ideal opportunity to carry out noisy and dust-generating work while schools are empty.
May 2018
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