Facilities
Safe Spaces: Smarter Premises Management for Schools
With many UK schools struggling with ageing buildings and maintenance backlogs, effective premises management isn’t just good practice, it’s essential for safety and continuity.
Around 700,000 pupils in England attend schools that require major rebuilding or refurbishment, and teacher surveys report widespread issues like leaks and temperature extremes that impact learning environments.
In this sofa session we’ll explore key strategies to strengthen your site(s)' premises planning and compliance:
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- Contingency Plans for Caretaker Absence: Ensuring safety and operations stay on track even when key staff are unavailable.
- Combination Audits and Compliance: Practical approaches to streamline checks and meet regulatory requirements with confidence.
- GEMS in your school: How to leverage guided entry and management systems (or similar tools) to support smarter premises overnight.
Let us introduce you to this week's professional speakers
Joanne Fisher
Joanne is Head of Facilities Staffing and has worked in the education facilities sector for 25 years as an advisor and facilitator across the spectrum of educational establishments. Her practical support and hands on approach have helped guide senior educational leaders through premises, cleaning, facilities and budgetary challenges in an ever changing and now compliant based workplace.
She has implemented change within educational facilities by conducting solution-based advice and audits to produce tangible, financially viable and lasting improvements in areas of operational failure.
Joanne has consistently demonstrated a passion to navigate and support schools through the many challenges of educational sites and premises. Her dedication to improvement and commitment to her role has seen her build and sustain exceptional working relationships with many schools and MATs over the course of two and a half decades.
Neil Merry
Neil Merry has worked in Facilities for almost 30 years with 20 of those in Education. He started his facilities journey at Selfridges in Oxford Street before becoming a school caretaker at a primary school in East London. He then moved on to become a site manager at a large primary school managing cleaning staff, contractors and an assistant before joining Judicium as an Operations Manager. Neil manages in excess of 60 field staff who work in schools across London providing assistance and support in all aspects of premises related issues.
Neil has a passion for problem solving and will always provide schools with viable options to fix, improve and maintain and his lived experience of being a caretaker means that he can tackle problems at all levels. Unfortunately, his marvellous problem solving hasn’t quite extended to moving West Ham further up the premier league but he’s working on it!
