The Education Funding Agency (EFA) is playing a central role in revitalising schools across the UK with offsite techniques and modular buildings playing a major part. Blacc Consulting’s Richard Crosby now leads the team making it all happen. He took some time out of his busy schedule for a quick Q&A on what offsite can deliver.
Q: How did you become involved with working with the EFA and become its ‘modular champion’?
The EFA’s Priority School Building Programme (PSBP) team were struggling to get contractor interest in a number of primary schools through existing procurement routes and needed to explore options to widen the market. I was asked to take a look at what alternatives there were and come up with a procurement strategy. We identified that a volumetric-led approach was one option that could be developed and used not only for immediate requirements but also for the PSBP2 programme which is a more block-based programme. This needed a different type of procurement approach to that used previously by the EFA and had to be adapted to suit the nature of the offsite industry's business and not just a use a procurement process designed for traditional contracting.
Q: What is your day-to-day role for the EFA?
I provide consultancy services to help the EFA to build great schools. Part of that is identifying that procurement and design for offsite construction techniques can help hugely, so I am working with procurement and delivery teams to create solutions that enable schools to achieve quality bespoke buildings and ‘drive value’ by identifying the elements behind the offsite building process where efficiencies can be gained. The idea received a rather mixed response when first cited almost three years ago. There had been perception issues with quality of offsite delivery and costs but the EFA fully understood it had needed to develop alternative procurement routes to meet a changing world. Mike Green and Rachel Stephenson from the EFA’s Capital Board have been incredibly supportive in letting me see what these routes can do.
Q: How central to the overall PSBP programme are offsite methods and in particular modular construction?
The EFA have been using various offsite solutions via their main contractor and regional framework for some time. These were developed in response to Sebastian James’ report Review of Education Capital in 2011, using their baseline design and batched procurements. I have been building on that and designing a procurement strategy to suit the modular and offsite providers to give access directly to them rather than via a main contractor. This is only part of the solution as main contractors will still be needed on refurbishment schemes in particular but they will need to push the boundaries to drive out efficiencies in such a large programme of work. Offsite can help to improve efficiency, cost and quality and importantly in live school environments, it can reduce disruption time and improve H&S management. The industry has banged the drum for a long time on this, but it needs clients to examine how they do things and change how they manage their programmes. The EFA have started to see this and are responding really well.
Q: Can you say a little about PSBP1 and 2 and the new pilot £95 million frameworks to design and build modular primary schools in England? What percentage of the PSBP will ultimately be modular?
The volume of work that the EFA will do in modular or other offsite techniques is largely up to the market and its ability to deliver. We have three £95 million frameworks at present: one for complete Primary Schools due to be awarded this month (March), the second is for Primary Blocks and is designed to bring in some SMEs to open up the market and I have been really pleased with the market response to the PQQ. The third framework will be for Secondary Block, which is set to go to market later in the spring.
Q: What is driving the adoption of offsite methods by the Department of Education – have they been ahead of the curve in the recent surge of interest in offsite and really grasped its benefits?
The prime driver is need. Funding is tight for the volume of schools that are needed and the construction industry is comparatively inefficient. We cannot keep doing the same thing in a rising market with skill shortages and expect costs to reduce unless we become more efficient. Efficiency is driven by the funding and procurement routes. It was refreshing to read Mark Farmer’s report last year which reaffirmed what I had been working on and helped support my case to the EFA. I suspect the offsite industry contractors already knew this to be the case but clients and their advisors have to understand the market before they procure, not just expect the market to change around them.
Q: With standardisation central to cost efficiency and project timescales – can modular schools be architecturally and aesthetically better within those constraints?
Absolutely. The EFA want modular schools to look and feel like traditionally-built schools, I still think there is a long way to go to go in driving further efficiencies from the design and construction process, and I have plenty more ideas on how we can achieve this! It would be great to see some of the costs saved fed back into the building to further enhance the learning environment as well as provide better value for the public purse and help deliver more schools for the same money.
Q: The EFA has a very specific design guide – what does this entail in creating healthier learning environments for staff and pupils – and how do modular buildings fit into this guide?
The EFA design guide is critical in setting the outline specification for schools both in terms of minimum sizes and building performance. The building performance is important in providing a comfortable learning and working environment. We had some fun and games dealing with daylighting and thermal mass and the scheduling of areas. We also had to address the issue of the ‘feel of the building’ so we amended the EFA’s standard design guide to counter the fact it was originally written with a traditional build in mind. We learned a huge amount from the first few procurements and are now at the point where we have developed our own baseline design report for primary schools and we are in in the middle of doing the same for secondary schools to help inform the market better for future procurements.
Q: Finally, what knowledge and project expertise have you brought from Blacc Consulting?
We bring what I consider to be true ‘programme management’ expertise and an innovative way of thinking. It’s not just about managing multiple projects, Blacc see it as an opportunity to drive down cost for our clients by creating clear efficiencies. I have had the privilege of working with some of the best project and programme environments with contractors, consultants and clients delivering some amazing, challenging schemes. Blacc has enabled me to pull together some of the best people from those projects and work with them again. One of our first projects was delivering the programme and contract management of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and since then we have branched out not only to the EFA, as well as Network Rail, Transport for Greater Manchester, Calderdale Council and Liverpool John Lennon Airport to name just a few.
For more information visit: www.gov.uk/government/organisations/education-funding-agency
Source: Offsite Magazine - Issue 5
