ESTATES
Central Estates Team
The Estates Team ranges from a Chartered Construction manager, with over 20 years of working in both Construction, Project and Facilities Management, through to a Premises and Maintenance Apprentice to support each school both at a Strategic and Reactive level.
Health and Safety
Our Estates Lead provides centralised support and advice at all levels when needed.
Within the first week of the Covid Pandemic our Estates Lead developed a comprehensive Covid Policy, reviewed weekly and updated as required. This provided full support at a regulatory level as well as advice and wellbeing support. Feedback from Unions was overwhelmingly supportive with commentary that the transparency and pragmatic approach was both well thought through and clear. At one point this policy was ranked number one on Google Search hits for School Covid Policies.
A comprehensive Health and Safety Policy is published and frequently reviewed and expanded. Each individual element is reviewed annually with full dedicated policies created as legislation changes.
CIF and Other Grant Funding
The Trust actively seeks funding streams available both through the DfE and other national centralised funding. The Trust has secured just short of £2M worth of additional funding through the DfE Condition Improvement Fund over the last 3 years, a national academy competitive bid process.
Budgeting
The Trust Estates Team work closely with each individual school to establish premises priorities and each school has a detailed 5 year plan to allow effective budget control, reducing risks by establishing need and planning for growth whilst ensuring existing assets are managed appropriately.
This plan is extended to 10 years where possible to ensure inclusion of strategic redevelopment and replacement to each asset.
Compliance
The Trust Estates Team work with the whole premises network to ensure full Health and Safety compliance, monitor progress and Contracts. This done at a local level with individual Site Manager and overseen by the Central Estates team as necessary.
Full use of PPM Trackers and Compliance dashboards ensure suitable reviews of Contracts are undertaken in advance to limit and maintain costs.
Maintenance
Each individual site has a dedicated Site Manager who reports at both local and Central level to ensure knowledge and skill sharing along with a team approach to enable complex tasks to be undertaken “in house” where possible.