Education

Schools have six weeks, sometimes less, and the date at the end of it does not move. That single constraint shapes everything: how surveys are scoped, how works are sequenced, and what gets phased across two summers rather than forced into one.

We are honest at the outset about what genuinely fits inside a holiday and what does not. An overrun in September is measured in children out of classrooms rather than in liquidated damages, and that is not a conversation you want to be having with a head teacher in the first week of term.

University estates have a longer run at it, though the September date is just as fixed, and halls handing over at the start of term carry the same risk as any other student building.

Funding shapes an education estate as much as condition does. Bids have fixed deadlines and need costed, evidenced proposals, so a condition survey is only useful if it arrives in a form the funding round can actually accept.

So we help prioritise by risk to teaching rather than by what is cheapest to fix, and we connect the defect to the consequence. A failing roof is not a roof problem, it is a classroom that closes. That is the argument that wins capital.

We are equally realistic about what will not be funded this year, and what that means for the buildings that have to keep going anyway. Most estates teams know this already. It helps to have somebody else write it down.

Most education estates are an accumulation rather than a design. A Victorian block, sixties system build, a nineties extension and something new at the end of the car park, each with its own problems and very little surviving record of how they were altered.

That is where RAAC surveys, asbestos, compartmentation and fire door condition matter. Trusts and academies often hold client duties under CDM without having been told, and university halls above eighteen metres fall within the higher-risk building regime. None of it is difficult once identified. All of it is awkward found late.

Buildings full of young people need judgement rather than a checklist, and judgement comes from seeing
the same estate year after year rather than surveying it cold.