FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
ENSURING COMPLIANCE
The Governance in ESG is often misunderstood. But for schools a simple way of looking at it, is as compliance. It means protecting the safety, welfare and health of all those associated with our schools. Its working to statutory legislation covering all the key areas in and around the buildings – something crucial to all Ofsted reports. We are proud of our track record – one independent Health and Safety auditor at one of our sites this year reported it as being the best they had seen! But compliance is not something to switch on or off. It is a continuous process. There are important key milestones to meet and keep up to date – as you would with any of your operations in the school and all this allows for that type of activity to continue.
In every school there is a responsible person and duty holder, usually a member of staff and often part of the senior management team. They are the focal point for the school’s health and safety management arrangements but rarely are they experts in building compliance. This is where the FM provider is involved, guiding and advising them in order to keep ahead of their statutory obligations.
MAINTAINING STANDARDS
As well as our statutory maintenance, at our schools we work to optimal and discretionary standards, such as SFG20 and this comes into the category of best servicing to extend the life of our assets. You need to be completely sure of all your assets, so they all have a regime of some kind if being used within the school. We do asset condition surveys each year – it is all part of the monitoring process to help understand the condition of the built environment and external surroundings to help budget and plan for further repairs, maintenance, lifecycle delivery and management. We hold everything on a central database to ensure we have captured it in a maintenance regime.
We use the latest technologies and tools to deliver our services collaboratively. Our teams can take a high-definition, three-dimensional scan of a school and combine it with building location, asset, and condition data to enable the client to create a digital twin and then conduct virtual building walk-throughs. This virtual 360 degree walk gives total visibility of the asset detail, paperwork and certification as well as records of completed maintenance and the overall condition. It all makes collaboration much easier, allowing the whole team – client, FM and supply chain partners to make informed decisions and coordinate the complex works programmes.
Day-to-day FM within a school is not straightforward as during term time there is always something going on – before school activities, lessons times, school clubs and community groups hiring the facility in the evening. That’s why planning and specialist tools help make compliance and governance easier. The priority is creating a PPM (planned preventative maintenance) plan listing all your assets, frequency of maintenance and when it is due. On most school projects, we have to sensibly plan this in to ensure it fits with the operation of the school. This means the holiday periods are our busiest time, so that we can get to work without disrupting the life of the school.
This programme is loaded into our CAFM system, so that it allocates the jobs which are due at a particular time in the month. We have tools to measure this compliance with a per cent score met which our clients are keen to see and monitor on a monthly basis, and we use our MYMI dashboard for that. Our MYMI dashboard is a real time presentation of how we are meeting our targets. It retains the paperwork and certification for completed jobs. It holds an accurate record of all those open and closed which is always important for a formal trail. Along with the dashboard report, these are benefits we use every day at the schools to assist in audits and to give all the confidence of us meeting the statutory requirements.
This G of ESG is the golden thread running through all of our school FM work. It binds the sustainability and carbon reduction and allows us to deliver on social value and truly make the FM work we deliver a central part of the school’s wider community.
