It’s well-known that schools and multi-academy trusts are having to work harder than ever to save money amid ever-tightening budgets, not least with a potentially unfunded pay rise looming.

On top of that, facilities managers and operating officers face ever-growing complexities around managing school and trust sites that mix old and new buildings laden with issues - that require complex funding bids to the government to fix.

No doubt this is why there were large audiences at the Schools and Academies Show, in Excel London, this week for several sessions where senior trust leaders outlined a raft of practical ideas for tackling these issues and things to be aware of. Here are some of the key insights we heard:

Maintaining school buildings on a tight budget

1. Prioritise safety fixes first

“When you’re surrounded by what seems like an avalanche of things to do, you have to prioritise.”

This was a key message from Anne Alsop, director of finance and operations at Cheltenham Bournside School, which has almost 2,000 pupils.

“It’s easy to be overwhelmed,” she said. “When I arrived we had 27 different areas with buckets [for catching rainwater] and we’d been through five business managers and three headteachers in three years, so there was a lot of churn and not a lot of focus.”

However, Ms Alsop said that from looking at her health and safety audits and accident logs, it was clear where her first priority had to be: “On average, there was a child going through a window every 12 months. Some accidents were really severe, but the need to fix this was being lost.”

She made securing a Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) grant to replace all single-pane windows a major first task.

2. Rationalise your data

Of course, to prioritise you need to know where the problems are - so ensuring that you have good data insights is crucial. This was a point made by Lana Stoyles, executive director of business transformation at Nexus Multi Academy Trust.

“I manage 32 sites so data is my eyes and ears,” she said.

With this in mind, she said the trust has been through a big exercise in the past 12 months to carry out “surveys on all our assets and maintenance requirements so we have up-to-date information on where we are”.

This included bringing together health and safety and accident reporting systems into the same place, so “rather than having five different systems I have to look at and scratch my head and wonder what to prioritise”, there is now a “clear picture of the system in its entirety”, she said.

3. Consider cost savings from data

Better data not only helps with planning but can also save money if thought is given to where savings might be found, said Paul Broadbent, an associate at education property organisation LocateED.

“Real-time data can be really useful. For example, 30 minute energy meters that collect data on usage can see where excessive use is taking place - such as IT or catering equipment left on at a weekend and what could be switched off - which would be a very easy win.”

He noted, too, that given the size of the school estate nationwide - which he cited as 500 million square metres - it is clear that the sector has “huge opportunities” to make better use of data to “inform decisions” in this way.

4. Audit your stationery purchasing

There was a palpable sense of shock in the room when Ben March, chief finance officer at Step Academy Trust, revealed that his trust had saved £130,000 by taking control of stationery buying across its 20 schools.

March explained that whereas before stationery was being bought from a variety of places by schools individually, the trust moved instead to a single supplier to ensure the best deals possible, and then rationalised what was actually needed.

“We went from spending £150,000 in one year to £20,000 the next,” he said.

5. Sweat the small stuff

On a similar theme, Caroline Munroe, head of finance at Advance Learning Partnership, said it is vital to comb through expenditures to avoid unnecessary duplications of costs, especially on subscription services.

“When we take on new schools [we really drill down into] the subscriptions they’ve got that are duplicated across different departments,” she said.

She noted that they often find instances of subscriptions still being paid for services no longer in use: “It might be that the maths league left four years ago, but we’re still paying for [a subscription] they were using.”

“I really do think drilling down, understanding where everything is being spent, is vital, as often it’s the smaller spends that add up to make the biggest impact,” Ms Munroe said.

6. Plan ahead - the money may come

Planning for a project you know you don’t have the money for may sound pointless - but Robin Harrison, facilities and resources manager at Rushcliffe Spencer Academy, said this was his number one piece of advice. “Always have more projects than money,” he said.

His argument was that money can often be found unexpectedly - from grants and funding pots or even legacies left to a school - so if you have the plans drawn up, you are in a far stronger position, rather than having to be reactive.

“Don’t be put off because you don’t have the money now - plan for the project and then see what you might get funding for, because then you already have a strong business case ready to go,” said Mr Harrison.

7. Don’t ignore the power of a good building

Alsop at Cheltenham Bournside School also had a tale to tell around why a good building is important to a school’s income. “I hate to say it but pupils are money and so if numbers are failing, you can get into a dreadful cycle,” she said.

One area where this was playing out at the school was in its sixth form, not least because the buildings were “probably the most unloved area of the school...it was a dingy, nasty space”, Alsop said, noting that it was often where unwanted furniture was dumped.

With newer schools and sixth forms nearby with better facilities, many students were opting to go elsewhere.

However, a major refurbishment that revamped the existing space and added in new study zones, a cafe and a common room, has seen numbers increase by 38 per cent in two years.

This project was not simple, with an initial plan costed in at £580,000 - far beyond budget. However, a simpler second-round design landed at £270,000, and Alsop also sent her head of estates and site managers on construction, design and management (CDM) training to help save costs. “It meant we could manage these projects in-house,” she said.

8. Ground source heat pumps - ‘not for the faint-hearted’

Alsop also delivered a fascinating insight into the work required to install a ground source heat pump. “It’s not for the faint-hearted,” she admitted.

A ground source heat pumps works, she explained, by taking the warmth stored deep underground to bring heat into the buildings above.

The project involved drilling 64 bore holes 157 metres deep, on average, in the school grounds near its playing fields, and then cabling in 10km of piping to run heating to around 52 per cent of the school site.

The project cost a whopping £9 million - delivered by various government grants - but should enable the school to become carbon-neutral in the years ahead, and in the term, save money on its energy costs - although Alsop admitted that maintenance costs were higher than anticipated.

It wasn’t easy going either, with attempts to have it all installed over a summer holiday not being achieved, meaning that some final stage work had to be completed while the school was in use. And the balancing act of CIF grant sign-offs and plenty of unexpected issues was a lot to manage.

Alsop admitted that because of how novel this is in education, her school had inadvertently become something of “a guinea pig” for this sort of installation - which she said could be good news for other schools as suppliers will have learned lessons from this to streamline future projects.

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