The Road to GEMZ: Part Four
Scenario Planning: The Ultimate Strategic Estates Tool
The Road to GEMZ (Great Estate Management Zero) is a four-part blog series highlighting the challenges academies face in achieving strategic oversight of their estates, often leading to misinformed decisions and poorly costed outcomes. Catch up on the first instalment here.
For the vast majority of trusts, the identified risks and costs associated with their estates’ built environment far outstrip their revenue and reserves. As a result, they are faced with the challenge of prioritising expenditure on the elements posing the highest risk.
Achieving the best return on investment is paramount. This requires a fact-based, methodical approach to working through appraised options, arriving at the optimum outcome, and evidencing how and why such decisions were reached.
The identification of appropriate funding streams – and the submission of strong applications – can have a significant impact on a school’s built environment at substantially reduced cost. Those successfully awarded Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) projects typically secure contract values averaging £400,000, with schools generally contributing 10%–15%. This enables schools to preserve capital for other important projects that may not meet the increasingly stringent CIF thresholds.
Governments of all stripes accept that their finite resources will fall short of addressing the estimated £20 billion backlog in condition need, let alone the £30 billion required to decarbonise the 22,000-strong school estate. In response, and over recent years, the now nearly 20-year-old Academy Trust Handbook (ATH) has been gradually redrafted to permit compliant lease options. These can remove CAPEX restrictions for trusts lacking significant reserves.
Some schools benefit from premises that allow them to generate income through lettings. Others are able to draw on reserves to self-fund projects, enabling savings and the creation of additional revenue streams. Still others have entered long-term partnerships with supply chain providers, securing substantial volume discounts through guaranteed contract values.
All of these approaches depend on careful planning and rigorous cost appraisal, underpinned by accurate, cross-referenced data.
This is precisely what our upcoming GEMZ Scenario Planning tool is designed to support. Launching later in 2025, GEMZ has been developed in close collaboration with critical friends across the education sector and consultants in the health sector. Both schools and hospitals face remarkably similar challenges in condition and decarbonisation, and we’ve created an estates management system to support identification of need, align opportunities with funding (both public and private), and build capital project programmes that deliver maximum value.
We’re excited to bring this to market – and to help trusts make smarter, data-driven decisions about their estates. Watch this space, or contact me if you’d like more information about access to an exclusive preview in the coming weeks.
