GovWire

Understanding the estate

Department For Education

July 26
15:01 2023

Successful estate management relies on the collection, analysis, and storage of important documents and accurate data.

It is important that you understand:

  • what estates information you hold
  • how to store your information
  • how to use your information

Effective management of your estates data and documents can give significant benefits, increase the effective use of resources and speed up the quality of decision making.

Documents and data

To manage your estate effectively, you will need some important documents and estates data.

While the precise nature of each colleges estate will dictate exactly what information it should hold, most colleges should hold key legal and operational documents including:

Legal documents

Operational documents

  • maintenance plans and records
  • statutory compliance records
  • inspection records and test certificates
  • building warranties and guarantees
  • operation and maintenance manuals
  • as-built drawings and floor plans
  • digital information from building information modelling (BIM)
  • facilities management agreements
  • energy performance certificates
  • utilities, security, and other relevant contracts
  • fire strategy
  • asbestos register

In addition to these documents, you should collect and hold a wide variety of operational estates data. This will include data sets which do not change much over time, such as the number of sites within your estate or the gross internal area (GIA) of buildings, as well as data sets which are important or strategic for reporting purposes, such as energy consumption or running costs.

Operational estates data should include:

All colleges hold and generate various types of data about their estates. This information usually comes from a variety of sources.

To help you manage your estate effectively, you should ensure that you have policies in place to collect, store and manage data and key documents.

Collecting, storing and managing data

Estates documents and data are of little strategic use if they are held in disparate parts of your college, are understood only by individuals rather than formally recorded, or are held in inconsistent formats and styles.

Effective practice point

A named responsible individual such as the college clerk or finance director should be responsible for the collection, storage, back-up, maintenance, and security of key estates documents and property data. This designated person, or data controller, such as the clerk or finance director, should make sure estates documents are understood, co-ordinated and managed effectively across your college.

In practice, documents may be held in different places, or alternatively they may all be stored in a single electronic file, but the named individual is responsible for co-ordinating the estates records and checking with other managers where and how information is stored.

The data controller with overall responsibility for estates information may choose to appoint other staff from the colleges estates team, or elsewhere within the college, to provide them with regular updates and reports on estates data. You need to understand the needs of your college before deciding on how best to manage your estates information.

You can use web-based collaborative platforms and data management software to:

  • centralise storage of estates information
  • control access to data
  • monitor data capture and usage

Where possible, you should try to store and manage your estates data in a single system as it both reduces the need to manage several different systems and lowers the risk of data duplication and reporting errors.

Whatever approach you take, you should ensure that your data storage and management system is able to:

  • accept all data types that you need for your organisation
  • provide data input control to ensure accuracy and consistency
  • be easy to use and provide support and training where required
  • allow many users to use it at the same time
  • store and manage documents
  • interface with other systems
  • allow data migration and data updating
  • provide reporting functions
  • provide a full audit process

The data controller should lead on establishing and maintaining a clear understanding of data requirements across your whole organisation.

Effective practice point

When appointing consultants, you should make sure that any technical estates data supplied by them is provided in a format which is compatible with your data storage and management system.

Using estates data

As well as playing an important role in day-to-day estate management, your estates data can be used in the short, medium and long-term to monitor your performance against various key performance indicators (KPIs) and support strategic objectives.

Your senior leaders and governors should establish which core estates data they wish to see reported. These might include:

  • energy and water consumption and costs
  • property management costs
  • room utilisation rates
  • maintenance expenditure
  • statutory compliance
  • lease events, including:
    • rent reviews
    • expiration dates
    • break dates

This information can be used in conjunction with other data held by the college, such as curriculum information or learner numbers, to provide valuable insights into how best to manage the estate.

Data retention

When dealing with estates data, you should implement a data retention policy to ensure that data is stored for the correct period of time (either for the purposes of best practice or for practical requirements).

Table giving typical data retention periods

Retention period Data period Rationale
Permanent Records Making an item a record saves it permanently for example for deeds, leases and title documents
10 years Project Aligns with warranties and guarantees
7 years Financial Accords to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)
4 years Operational Aligns with typical contract lengths
Ad hoc Compliance An annual inspection for example is superseded by the next inspection

Other legislation

Types of data are also subject to legislation (for example

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