q&a
Allan Hunt, Director, Education at AHR Building Consultancy, and an expert on the CIF bidding process, shows how to make limited funding go further
EDB: When money is so tight, what’s the most important thing an academy school should do to improve its estate? It may sound self-evident but the single most important thing that an Academy or small chain can do for the future of their school buildings – and to achieve efficiency savings - is to ensure a full knowledge of all their current condition, and likely deterioration over the near future. This is best achieved through a good quality, thorough condition survey and development plan, which form far and away the most effective basis for strategic long-term planning. After all, you cannot make coherent plans by working with patchy information, and for smaller MATs and single Academies, who are unlikely to have a dedicated Estates Manager, this can be even more important.
EDB: That’s pretty much what the Government recommended in last year’s guidance document Good Estate Management for Schools, isn’t it? Yes, you’re right. It’s a very sensible document because the benefits of long- term planning are manifold. For one, not considering the whole picture can create duplication. As a hypothetical example, imagine, say, refurbishing the interior of a school block one year, only to find shortly afterwards that the roof begins to leak, destroying the entire scheme. You have wasted both money and effort. Repeated interventions, necessitated by tackling problems as they come up rather than planning in advance, is not only disruptive of school life but cost inefficient, since bulking like works together can garner savings from contractors.
Detailed knowledge of the condition of your campus also stands you in good stead if disaster does strike, since waiting for urgent issues to arise creates added pressure. For example while CIF exists for critical problems (and by and large the more urgent the problem the more likely a bid is going to succeed), a bid put together too hastily can nonetheless scupper your chances. So whilst unexpected issues can arise, the more you know about the condition of your buildings, the better prepared you will be to take appropriate action.
EDB: It’s all very well to say ‘plan for the future but it’s difficult to anticipate shifting future needs. How do you cope when there’s so much change going on in Education? True, but failing to plan, or to consider the bigger picture of how buildings interrelate, is just storing up problems for yourself. While change appears to be a constant in education, there are ways to head off problems. Isolated thinking creates isolated
solutions, so you might, for example, set out to undertake a basic refurbishment of one school block (possibly with CIF funding for critical aspects) only to realise a few years later that curricular changes or new teaching methods make a wholesale rethink necessary. Instead, the expectation of change could have been ‘built-in’ at the same time by designing flexibly, to create a space that can be used in many different ways.
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