Category: Intelligent Operations

Can you believe we’re almost in the middle of January already? With the memory of the festive season rapidly fading and the weather getting a little frosty, it can only mean one thing – Spring is around the corner! There’s no time like the present to start planning for that spring deep-clean, and if one of your New Year’s resolutions was to try and be more conscious of your environmental impact, then the introduction of enviro soluble sachets to Wandsworth schools in the Solo cleaning contract could be just what you need to accomplish your goals.

With the shear quantity of cleaning products used as part of the contract it made sense that when offered the new packaging we jumped at the opportunity with the use of reusable dispensers and sachet-based refills.

The new products are environmentally friendly in a number of ways:

• Safe – the new packaging results in a product that is 80% lighter, meaning that heavy lifting is a thing of the past.
• Sustainable – With the use of reusable dispensers it results in a huge 70% reduction in packaging, and the 30% remaining is biodegradable.
• Compact – Saves up to 37% in storage space compared to the old packaging.
• The range of cleaning products itself is biodegradable and 100% phosphate free with 100% effective formulations. The entire range is manufactured to ISO 14001 / 9001 standards.

Sachets arrive in compact, sustainable, compostable packaging and can be used with refillable colour coded trigger spray bottles so there is no confusion over what refill is used with what dispenser. Just add water according to the preparation directions and go! Cinderella wishes she’d had it this easy. Who else could say that their kitchen degreaser is a 100% zero waste product?

To put the benefits in perspective Solo have calculated the following benefits across their contracts companywide:

• A saving of almost 9 tons of plastic per year
• The environmental impact of transporting the new packaging over the old is greatly reduced by a reduction of 121 metric tonnes in weight.

With the new year comes new beginnings; a warm welcome to the newest member of our team, Vendula Kredlova, who joined us as the new Contracts Officer from the start of January.

The Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2023 update released earlier this year, regarding key changes to the KCSIE requirements and the new DfE Web Filtering standards, states that schools safeguarding leads are now responsible for web filtering and monitoring in their schools – previously seen as the responsibility of the school’s ICT Support teams. The KCSIE update sets out that schools are to play a much more pivotal role in how their web filtering is setup, monitored and used as a safeguarding tool to provide a safe, secure digital environment at schools for all students. The process will initially require the DSL’s to work closely with their SLT’s, and governors to get a grasp on how their web filtering is configured and to try to understand why… so, it is imperative that schools understand what is now expected of them, which resources are available to help and where these are to be found.

Mark Bentley at the LGfL runs a fantastic online course – LGfL’s Safeguarding Shorts for DSLs / other SLT: Web filtering in 30 minutes, that provides an overview and is a good starting point to better understand the filtering provided by the LGfL, how it works, the new school’s staff responsibilities and the reporting offered – once you have attended the above course you will be much clearer about what is involved and where you can obtain help, advice and support.

Here is a link to training offered by the LGfL: 

LGfL (https://lgfl.bookinglive.com/book/add/p/5)

There is a vast array of useful LGfL content for schools that will help with understanding more about this area and this can be found at:

https://lgfl.net/safeguarding

https://lgfl.net/Filtering-and-SafeTech

https://lgfl.net/services/webscreen-support

The Wandsworth ICT Support team is intent on providing you with the best possible advice, guidance, and support to help with these new changes, which can be challenging for school’s staff to take on, in an already busy and pressured environment. So, with the new KCSIE guidance and key changes to web filtering in mind, we have put together a new user guide on S4S that will help you to get to grips with the LGfL’s WebScreen / (SchoolProtect) system, understand the basics of how the system works and provide you with the practical knowledge you will need to monitor / manage your school’s web filtering and run reports necessary to meet the new requirements.  The guide can be found at https://s4s.wandsworth.gov.uk/Article/151570 

The Law

All schools have a duty to take reasonable care to ensure that all their staff and contractors are not injured whilst working and that members of the public aren’t injured in accidents connected to work. This is a legal obligation under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 sections 2 and 3.

Why?

• Company prosecuted by HSE and issued £126,000 fine as worker was left paralysed after falling from height via an unguarded window.
• Company fined £1.4m following death of contractor when crushed by falling equipment.
• Responsible Person(s) receives prison sentence following the death of a contractor who fell from height. The defendants had failed to plan the work at height or to employ competent contractors to carry out the work.

What is a contractor?

A contractor is anyone you get in to work for you who is not an employee.

Examples could be:

• Cleaners
• Fire Alarm Engineer
• Painter & Decorator 
• Plumber
• Catering Services

What could go wrong?

Accidents happen more easily when the contractor’s job is excluded from your usual methods of safe working.

Accidents with contractors can be caused by poor communication – when staff don’t know there is a contractor working nearby and when contractors don’t know the dangers on site or local emergency procedures.

Contractors are subject to greater hazards and risks than your own employees because they are not familiar with your environment and potentially due to the nature of works, they will be performing for you.

What should you do?

Both you and the contractor you use have responsibilities to implement safety measures. Make sure everyone understands the part they need to play in ensuring health and safety.

Additional duties:

• Identify all aspects of the required job and consider the health and safety implications. 
• You need to satisfy yourself that the contractor you choose can do the job safely and without risks to health (competency) – You must check for things such as Risk Assessments/Method Statements (RAMS), appropriate insurance cover, qualifications, and professional accreditations etc.
• With the contractor ensure a suitable and sufficient risk assessment is in place for intended work.
• Communicate with contractor throughout to ensure everybody, including your own employees are clear on risks present, control measures and emergency procedures.
• Cooperate and coordinate with contractor to ensure work can be done without risks to health and safety.
• Consult with your own employees on proposed works and how they should raise any concerns about contractors and their work.
• Ensure adequate supervision is in place whilst contractor operates on your site. 

Contractors and ‘Construction’ Works 

If the task involve construction works, the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 will apply. (CDM 2015)

• What is ‘construction’ work? – The Definition Of Construction Work Under CDM 2015 – HASpod
• What is a client? – Any person for whom a project is carried out.

Key Points:

• All construction work under CDM 2015 requires planning, but the plan for smaller jobs should be simple, short and proportionate to the risks.
• The definition of maintenance work has not changed. If the task in hand looks like construction work, requires construction skills and uses construction materials, it is construction work.
• CDM 2015 makes the Client accountable for the impact of their decisions and approach to H&S/Welfare

References

• Using contractors: A brief guide (hse.gov.uk)
• Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 (hse.gov.uk)
• Health and safety in construction (HSG150) (hse.gov.uk)

H&S Support?

The Health and Safety Team is available to provide support and guidance on any matters that could impact on your health and safety arrangements. 

The HSE will be carrying out a programme of inspections in primary and secondary schools from October 2023. The inspections will be assessing how sites are managing the risks from asbestos within their buildings.

During their 2022/23 inspections, the HSE found significant failings in management systems – leading to enforcement action being taken – in 7% of schools.

To assist sites, the HSE have published a revised Asbestos Management Checklist.

All sites that have Asbestos Containing Materials (ACMs) present must ensure they have:

• an asbestos register
• an up to date asbestos management plan
• records of periodic monitoring of the condition of any ACMs (as suggested by the asbestos survey) records of
• communicating the presence of ACMs to contractors (where necessary)  

The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 (CAR) place duties on those with responsibility for the maintenance of work premises to manage the risk from asbestos.
 
HSE inspectors will contact sites in advance to arrange a suitable date and time for an inspection. They will need to speak to someone with knowledge of how asbestos is managed by the site, and may also ask to see certain documents in advance of the visit e.g. your asbestos register and management plan.
 
Sites should review their current arrangements and check that they are meeting their duties under CAR:

• take reasonable steps to find out if there are ACMs in the premises – and if so, the amount, where it is and what condition it is in, i.e. an asbestos survey has been conducted by an approved contractor
• make – and keep up to date – a record of the location and condition of any ACMs (or materials which are presumed to contain asbestos), i.e. the asbestos register
• assess the risk of anyone being exposed to fibres from the materials identified
• prepare an asbestos management plan (AMP) that sets out in detail how the risks from these materials will be managed
• take the necessary steps to put the plan into action
• periodically review and monitor the plan and the arrangements, and act on the findings, so the plan and arrangements remain relevant and up to date
• provide information on the location and condition of the materials to anyone who is liable to work on, or disturb them – contractors should be shown the asbestos register, and it is good practice to maintain a record of this communication

Should you require guidance in relation to your management of asbestos, this is available at https://www.hse.gov.uk/education/asbestos.htm and https://www.gov.uk/guidance/asbestos-management-in-schools , or you can get in touch to have access to our school’s health and safety team.

How do you make your school stand out from other good local primary schools? With falling pupil numbers across London, St Joseph’s Primary School realised that having a distinctive ethos wasn’t enough to attract new students, they need their community and neighbours to know them. Not just as one of the nearby competitive Wandsworth primaries, but as ‘St Joseph’s school’.

After hearing a presentation by James from West Creative at Wandsworth Council School Business Networking meeting, bursar Grace McLeod was interested in using marketing to help get more parents choosing St Joseph’s. 

“I’ve only been at the school for about a year and a half. It’s a lovely school and I’d love everyone to portray it that way. Pupils really thrive and the Headteacher and senior leadership team are really lovely. But I don’t think families feel that we stand out as one of the best Catholic schools or as one of the best Wandsworth schools, and word of mouth plays a big role,” says Grace.

PROCESS WITH WEST CREATIVE

The next meetings, which included the Bursar and Head Teacher, were on-line video calls.

“James is very warm and easy to talk to. Sometimes you might not know how to describe what you want, but just by talking to him he understands, verbalizes and puts it down in the way you envisage it to be,” says Grace happily. 

The result is a branding campaign that Grace is confident will help people recognise St Joseph’s. 

“West Creative also helped us redesign our newsletter, and messages for our website. They gave us a template for a poster so we can use that to advertise the school. That campaign brand will be consistent throughout all our communications. The hero messages look so good and just go so well with all our other marketing materials,” she adds.

OUTCOME & VALUE FOR MONEY

“I’d recommend working with James and the West Creative team, they’re easy to talk to, made the process really simple, and was definitely value for money. James understands that school funding is really low at the moment. Schools shy away from marketing because they know it can be expensive, but I feel that West Creative was fair and good value for money,” adds Grace.

“I like to strategically plan and think about the ways our school can develop,” she explains. “That’s what business managers will get out of marketing – it can play a big role in thinking about the future and development of a school. That way the school can better plan and budget for resources, trips, education and wrap-around-care.”

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In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many organisations will have looked to their emergency and business continuity plans to deliver critical services and enable alternative ways of working. In fact, many of the things we learned during the pandemic will help us be more resilient in the future. 

Following a disruptive incident, emergency and business continuity plans should be reviewed and updated with any lessons learned so the plans remain relevant. It’s important to embed the plans in your school’s culture by training your staff in their roles and exercising the plans to test if they work or need to be improved.   

If you haven’t reviewed, updated and exercised your emergency and business continuity plans since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, now is the time. It’s important to consider other emerging issues in your review process such as cyber-attacks, power outage, extreme weather so you can plan how to respond to and maintain your critical services should any of these disrupt your school. 

There is a template emergency plan on the Emergency Planning Team traded services portal that schools can download free of charge.

For any emergency planning or business continuity queries, set up a Head to Head meeting and we’ll connect you to our Emergency Planning Team.

“A big proportion (75%) of our budget was going on staffing, but the spreadsheets didn’t show what level people were being paid, (eg, .5 or full time),” says Fiona who employs 56 staff. 

Business manager, Dionne Campbell (who joined the school in 2018), adds that with figures out of sync, forecasting and pay felt, “like stabbing in the dark, with nothing that pulled the information together and no clarity.”

Things really changed when Smart Schools Financial Adviser, Charles Roberts, collaborated with a handful of pilot schools (and the payroll service) to devise a more accurate financial planning system for Wandsworth. The aim was to reduce the time and effort it takes heads and business managers to estimate the cost of the workforce and reconcile actual pay with the school’s budget.

“It’s a different approach to a problem,” says Charles, “and that’s important because 80 per cent of a school’s budget is spent on staffing, and if our existing Excel tool was a few per cent out, that’s material. If your forecast is out by even one or two percent of income that’s quite a chunkof cash when school budgets are managed so tightly.”

So how does the magic happen? Charles explains: “The app replicates the reality of all things that happen in the payroll service and payroll departments and is more accurate on national insurance, pensions, spreading a salary across the months in the year, managing pay rises and changes in incremental grades and also manages to model ad hoc payments for extra hours or overtime.”

This enables a school to be able to recast their budget swiftly, if asked to do so.

“Smallwood school had an annual spend of £1.3m on staffing, and the tool was £14 different, which is why it’s called RAPTOR –ridiculously accurate planning tool for organisational resourcing. Ultimately, it’s all about giving the school business manager and head teacher confidence in the numbers,” says Charles.

For business manager Dionne this new way of financial planning speeded up the accuracy of the monthly payroll as well as the six monthly forward planning. “What Charles created pulls up errors in red so we can easily identify and investigate what should be paid and answer, for example, questions about why’s that person got an extra £100 – of yes they’ve done two extra hours.”

Reconciling payroll data is no longer super time- consuming. Charles explains that’s not unusual for schools as, “Some have 40-50 employees – but the tool just highlights those employees that need to be looked at, so is driving action by exception, rather than having to work through everybody. The tool does most of the work for you and will flag those it thinks you need to look at. That creates the feedback loop, so next month it gets more accurate.”

Less discrepancies also meant Smallwood spent less time trying tocontact the payroll team – a particular plus through lockdown when many people were working from home and seemed harder to reach.

Operating as a pilot, Smallwood has now been using it for a year. “Charlescomes in once a month. He has a report-ready database on his laptop which has got all of our staff data,” says Dionne explaining how the pair go through,“ line by line, so any discrepancies [eg, from sickness, pay increases, reduced hours, jury service, pensions, unpaid leave, unauthorised absence, extra hours and pension opt in and out] are highlighted quickly. It’s easier to use and really helped, as we feel more confident that this is the accurate figure on staffing and can put in any questions that governors have.

“We have confidence in the staffing structure of the school, andbeing able to keep it at the level we need, because very quickly we can see if the percentage

of pay for staff is going up, it gives us confidence about managing our budget and staff. It is now monitored so carefully, we are not going to get any big surprises,” says Fiona delightedthat the budgets are fit for purpose and reconciliation far quicker.

Dionne agrees: “Charles has been instrumental in supporting theschool and getting the budget into the really good position that it is in now. That app works really well.”

Visit finance.smartschool.services

In pursuing leaner operations and more efficient processes, time is an often overlooked factor to consider when looking at cost savings. 

As time invariably equates to money spent, you may look at reducing the school’s administrative burden through outsourcing, or engage with specialist educational expertise that adds value to your offer; or ensures your have the right plan in place to protect your position.

Operational drains on a school’s finances are not always obvious, which is why it is imperative to partner with a resource that can help you objectively view the complete picture.