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Copy linkCompliance goes digital at Kings Norton Girls’ School and Sixth Form
As a single academy trust, Kings Norton Girl’s School and Sixth Form (KNGS) manages a diverse estate, ranging from century-old buildings to newly opened facilities. With the support of Every HR by IRIS, the school has streamlined administrative processes, ensuring that critical tasks such as compliance, tracking, and site management are not added to their list of concerns. Additionally, Every Compliance played a crucial role when the school sought funding for an urgent site rebuild, providing the necessary evidence for capital funding applications, which resulted in the successful securing of £700k from the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) earlier this year.
Highlights
- Management maximises control over key processes at KNGS
- Every Compliance helped KNGS secure £700k from the Condition Improvement Fund for a site rebuild
- Staff can log real-time maintenance issues, enabling quick fixes and providing evidence for funding applications
- The system will support KNGS’s expansion into a multi-academy trust, offering visibility across multiple sites
How Every centralised key processes
Compliance was a key issue for KNGS, with processes being paper based before adopting Every HR by IRIS. “Our processes were effective, but paper-based, which made them unnecessarily burdensome for staff,” explains Clare Skinner, Business Manager at KNGS. Since implementing the software, she notes, “Paper records have been significantly reduced and will be almost entirely removed. Documents are now centralised for easy access by relevant team members, and the actions taken are more auditable by leadership and governance within the school.”
“Every Compliance is a superb aid when it comes to raising issues,” says Clare. “When my site team is reviewing tasks, they can easily prioritise what needs to be done and where to allocate resources.” She adds, “We set it up to be user-friendly for our operations team. When tickets are raised or activities are due, they receive email notifications, making it an efficient way to manage their workload.”
With Every's Compliance Management module, essential processes such as trust compliance, business management, policy and document completion and storage, and asset management are now all centralised in one place.
“Every HR by IRIS is powerful, reassuring, and accessible.”
Putting Every Compliance into action across the entire KNGS estate
Since the implementation of Every Compliance software, Clare encouraged all KNGS’s staff to proactively use it to report maintenance issues. “When I know that we’ve got a five-year plan for (potential) capital-funded projects that I need to submit to the government, I make sure all staff are aware of the plans. So, when they tell me in the corridor that ‘by the way, the roof in room two is leaking’, I can say ‘Please, log that on Every Compliance’.”
She explains that this process serves two purposes: “Firstly, I can use this ticket to get the site team to do a temporary fix. Secondly, I can bank this evidence for a CIF submission. For instance, I download a log of issues relating to ‘roof’ in Every Compliance. I use this information with finance data to see how much it costs to maintain it and make short-term fixes. If this amounts to a significant figure, then surely it would be a better use of money to do a permanent fix and replace the roof to stop disrupting lessons.”
Clare also notes how Every Compliance helps her track classroom closures due to condition issues,“The DfE is very keen to see evidence of the impact these issues have on a school’s operations, in particular, the difference the capital funding would make.”
A system which adapts to your school
Every's Compliance module allows instant access to the status of compliance across your organisation with customisable activity checklists so you can prioritise issues and run tailored reports with the click of a button. At KNGS, management has enjoyed the benefits of these features and now has a system adapted to their school.
“I would definitely recommend Every HR by IRIS to manage compliance in your school; the tailored modules mean that you can build it at your own pace and in line with your school’s priorities.”
Maximise control over your school processes with Every HR by IRIS
The Compliance module within Every HR by IRIS provides a central place to manage your school’s compliance requirements, allowing staff to be better informed. Clare tells us, “I feel much more in control of compliance and am able to better monitor issues in school. In turn, this will help decision-making around priorities using an effective, evidence-based approach.”
Amid the hustle and bustle of a school environment, having a system to simplify key processes gave Clare and her colleagues greater transparency into the school’s operations and ensured more thoughtful decision-making.
“It allows you to feel in control of compliance and make related decisions based on strong evidence of need. The system is user-friendly and flexes to our needs.”
Optimising asset management with Every Compliance
Every Compliance also plays a crucial role in Clare and her team’s asset management. "All my daily, weekly, and monthly activities, like boiler repairs and checking gutters, are logged into Every Compliance instead of using a manual checklist from the site team," she explains. This allows her to search for both issues and activities simultaneously, providing a comprehensive view of all the problems related to a specific asset, such as a boiler, along with the associated maintenance activities.
Clare attaches supporting documents to the asset’s file, such as service reports and invoices, to verify that work was completed and to track costs. “On Every Compliance, I can track my service level agreements to understand how much it should cost over the year, and then I match these figures back to my finance system,” she adds, demonstrating how the system helps manage both the operational and financial aspects of asset care efficiently.
Assistance in writing successful capital funding applications
Carefully working through the funding criteria and addressing each requirement helps schools and trusts present a compelling case to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) for why the funding is necessary. For KNGS, Every Compliance has proven invaluable in providing this evidence, a tool the trust has been using since April 2022. Clare explains, “I regularly pull data from Every Compliance to serve as evidence, demonstrating the impact of condition and maintenance issues on teaching, learning, and expenditure. To further justify the need, I use the system to produce reports that show how much we’ve spent on the estate this year.”
The trust’s business manager also emphasises the importance of staying organised and ensuring that all evidence is up to date. “Once I've got my [estates] plan, I know what to focus on and I make sure the evidence is up to date in Every Compliance. I treat this as an activity to check all the risk assessments and relevant reports are as current as they should be. To get evidence [to support bid writing], all staff across the school site use the system to log and raise maintenance issues – for example, what’s broken, leaking, or falling apart!”
Every Compliance scales with the growth of KNGS
In January 2025, KNGS will transition from a single academy trust to a multi-academy trust (MAT) with two other schools. Clare shares that conversations have already taken place regarding how the MAT will get an overview of assets at a trust level, rather than a single site level, “I’m sure that this growth will come, and I can rely on Every Compliance to scale with us, giving us visibility over what’s happening across the entire multi-site trust.”
