The Challenge of Managing Building Surveys for a MAT

Multi-academy trusts face a unique set of challenges when managing building surveys across their estates. Schools within a trust may be spread across a broad geographical area, leading to a lack of consistency and challenges in effectively prioritising and allocating funding.

The Problem with Traditional Building Surveys

While traditional building surveys are essential for identifying defects and potential risks, their effectiveness can be limited when dealing with a large portfolio of properties. Here's why:

• Inconsistency in Reporting: Different surveyors may have varying methodologies, reporting styles, and ways of assessing the severity of issues. This makes it difficult to compare surveys across different schools, hindering the ability to make informed decisions.
  
  
• Complex Data: Spreadsheets brimming with raw survey data can be overwhelming and lack strategic insights. It becomes a time-consuming task to identify cross-site commonalities and understand the overall condition of the estate.
  
  
• Prioritisation Difficulties: Without a standardised way to rank defects and their urgency, trusts can struggle to effectively allocate limited capital funding to the projects with the greatest impact on student safety and learning.

How Strategic Survey Software Can Help

Software designed specifically for educational estate management offers a way to streamline, standardise, and enhance the building survey process for multi-academy trusts:

• Consistent Methodology: Pre-configured survey templates aligned with industry and DfE standards ensure all schools are assessed on the same criteria. This eliminates discrepancies caused by individual surveyor approaches.
  
  
• Comparable Action Plans: Software automatically generates prioritised work plans based on survey findings, making it simple to compare the needs of different schools on a standardised scale.
  
  
• Accessible Summaries: Instead of delving into complex spreadsheets, trust leaders have easy-to-understand summaries of each school's condition, including key issues, risks, and recommended actions.
  
  
• Data-Driven Funding Decisions: Trusts can easily spot common themes across their estate and justify capital funding bids, ensuring that money is targeted toward the most pressing needs to maximise its impact.

The Benefits of Standardisation

By using a strategic survey tool, multi-academy trusts can:

• Save time and resources by eliminating the need for manual data comparison and analysis.
  
  
• Make better decisions informed by clear and consistent data.
  
  
• Increase transparency around building conditions and funding allocation across their estate.
  
  
• Demonstrate effective stewardship of resources to stakeholders.

Overcoming Challenges, Empowering Strategic Investment

For multi-academy trusts, the key to strategic estate management lies in standardising building surveys and transforming their raw data into actionable insights. The right software tools can make this process significantly easier and pave the way to making wiser investments in their school facilities for the benefit of their students and the wider trust community.