Few things spiral as quickly as a repair bill. This month, Clare Skinner explains how to make sure you’re catching those small repairs before they break the budget

In times where budgets are tight, we must make them stretch further and that is more and more challenging when most of us spend all day in what has been described as a “crumbling estate”. Many of our settings comprise of Victorian buildings or flat roofs from the 1960’s which are hard enough to maintain, but even new builds come with issues. So, how can we maintain our school property effectively whilst planning for capital improvements at the same time?

Budgets

As usual, it starts with the money and your budgeting. You need to ensure that you have your maintenance costs planned out so that you are compliant from an estates point of view but these need to sit alongside your capital cost centre which should reflect the planned needs of your setting as defined by your school development plan.

Not only should your capital pot include your devolved formula capital funding but consider what percentage of your annual revenue budget you can commit to supporting capital projects in the short and long term. Start small if you need to but build up that balance wherever possible so you can invest on a regular basis.

Data

Ensure you have a ticketing system in place. Whether it is a MS/Google Form, centrally located spreadsheet, logbook or a piece of software track all the maintenance and repair work that your staff are alerting you to. Don’t just rush in and fix things though – look at the cost obviously but consider the impact of the issue on teaching and learning. Go look at the issue, take photos of it (attach those images to your ticketing system) and then decide on the work in the context of other issues and get repairs made.

Now safe, warm and dry comes into play here, so compliance/health and safety issues must be addressed – but if funds are tight and you must make even just a temporary fix, don’t forget to get the evidence of the issue before you resolve it.

You can use other data sources as well; your finance system tracks spending so you can assess value for money and understand repeat expenditure on the same issue to decide if that leaky pipe under the Art room sink is the cause of something bigger in the space below it – and therefore a bigger issue than first thought.

Your absence management data will help you see if the rising damp and resulting black mould that is always being cleaned down in that science classroom is causing respiratory infections in your staff and increasing absence and driving up supply costs.

Advice

Get some professional advice as well; a good quality condition survey (to include mechanical and electrical assets) is worth every penny of the few thousands of pounds it may cost you. It will provide you with a detailed, prioritised plan to support maintenance activities in your setting by ranking the state of your buildings, grounds and infrastructure. Make sure that your report comes with budget figures included in it to highlight the level of investment you will need over the next five years to make the changes required.

These pieces of evidence build a picture that can support investment decisions whether it is what maintenance is done by your site team during half term, which small works take place at Easter, or which condition improvement funding bid you prepare for that big summer project. You can’t prioritise without a sound evidence base so keep building it and encourage others to contribute to it so that everyone plays a part in the upkeep and development of your estate and they understand why the priorities are as they are.

Using this approach will help you really understand your estates issues and keep you ahead of the game when it comes to either applying a sticking plaster to something or getting a firm fix in place. Who says that you can’t have your cake and eat it when it comes to maintenance vs improvements. Get the two to work side by side and to work for you rather than against you. Whilst a level of reaction is always required when it comes to maintenance, having a level of reflection at the same time so that money goes as far as it possibly can.