FEATURE: SCHOOL MAINTENANCE & DESIGN
Streamlining maintenance and management with software solutions to keep the focus on education delivery
risk and ensuring compliance. Here, Josh Mitchell, lead for Sypro’s Risk Manager solution, discusses how digital solutions can streamline asset management for mainstream and SEND schools and support with Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) expansion – all while keeping the focus on delivering strong education to pupils.
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chool maintenance and ongoing management is a critical operation, with the safeguarding and comfort of staff, pupils and visitors a top priority. However, recent funding announcements from the government demonstrate the severity of the maintenance picture across the UK’s schools. Better digital systems hold the key to avoiding dilapidation, managing
Earlier in the year, £2.5 billion was announced following union comments about school buildings ‘at risk of collapse’, with the funding allocated for upgrading buildings and creating extra places. This was in addition to the School Rebuilding Programme, which aims to transform 500 schools in the next decade, and a £487 million investment to help councils increase the number of pupil places needed for September 2026’s intake. Meanwhile, a further £456 million has been confirmed by the Department for Education for 859 academies, sixth-form colleges and voluntary aided schools to carry out refurbishment and repairs.
The concern remains that this funding barely touches the sides. At the last count, the cost of remedial work to repair or replace all defective elements in England’s school estate stood at £11.4 billion. So, the concern remains that the large amount of funding announced still barely touches the sides of what is needed – all at a time
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of increasing pressure for schools to decarbonise and meet growing pupil demands, while still delivering a strong education.
Schools have – quite rightly – prioritised education spend over operational spend over the past decade, but especially so in the past three years as they have battled with the challenges of a global pandemic, new ways of operation and the onward impact on pupils.
So, the question remains, what can make school maintenance easier to manage? Enter risk management software. Implementation of such technology takes the heavy lifting and heavy thinking out of the processes around compliance, operations and asset management. Digitisation can support estate teams to manage planned and reactive maintenance by dealing with these jobs when they happen. This means that smaller issues, which can be dealt with in-house, don’t spiral and become larger and unmanageable from both practical and cost perspectives – and certainly don’t reach the point where buildings are ‘at risk of collapse’. Creating high-quality, safe environments for learners goes hand-in-hand with the actual education being delivered – both are needed to truly thrive. If a student is not in an optimum environment, this creates distractions and barriers to learning, no matter how high the quality is.
June 2023
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