Growth can be difficult for any business. Having to scale your services to meet a new level of demand without interrupting delivery, and ensuring that your new customers are receiving adequate levels of service, leads to many sleepless nights for business owners of all types. In the education sector, dealing with growth is particularly turbulent. Students, as we all know, are easily distracted, and there’s nothing more distracting than having to deal with construction, moving to a larger campus or expanding classrooms during school hours.
That being said, with the right amount of planning and clear goals in mind, it’s possible to minimise the impact that a growing school will have on your learners’ and your teachers’ lives. In this article, we’ll look at some ways to make the process of enrolling more students and growing your school as straightforward as possible.
How to formulate a plan for growing your school to scale
Having a well-defined and detailed plan is essential if you’re planning on expanding your school facilities. To do that, you’ll have to identify your objectives and ensure that your key staff members are aware of these objectives, what needs to be done to meet them on time, and how this may impact their working environment. The following three steps will help you to plan your expansion strategy in a structured and goal-centric way:
Assess your school’s current state
Take a holistic view of your school: its staff, the school facilities, your culture and vision. This will bring to light the immediate challenges that you’re facing and will allow you to assess each one individually and prioritise accordingly. Separate each challenge into short and medium-term objectives, and identify the resources you’ll need to allocate to each of these to ensure their resolution.
Identify long-term objectives
Once you’ve identified your short and medium-term objectives, you can evaluate how to build strategies around your school facilities for the long-term. These strategies will need to be rock-solid, as they will require a lot of work over a long period before they’re completed. As such, you’ll need to have detailed discussions with the school board, teachers, parents and students to uncover potential roadblocks and foster a culture of collaboration in the process. Once again, you’ll need to ensure that the appropriate resources can be sustainably allocated to these projects over the long-term, which requires further planning.
Execute your objectives
Lastly, you’ll need to decide exactly how you’ll execute the objectives you’ve identified. Short and medium-term objectives might have simple solutions and require the input of fewer individuals, but longer-term objectives might require a substantial amount of planning when it comes to the resources and staff hours you need to commit. Each school has its own culture, and as such, the way you execute your objectives will be largely up to you. It’s advisable, though, to consult with your fellow staff, as well as parents and students to ensure that you’re going about things in a way that creates the least amount of resistance for all parties involved.
Here’s a checklist of things to consider when you’re expanding your school facilities:
Basic services:
- Will your school be able to provide sanitation facilities for all new enrolments?
- Will the influx of students at the bigger school facility still allow for compliance with all relevant laws?
Acoustics:
- In relation to the size of the space, the extent and quality of the absorbing surfaces should be designed with the objective of providing a general background noise of 40 to 50 decibels.
- Visit this link for more examples of preferred noise levels.
School safety and security:
- Will school buildings and other school facilities still be able to conform to all laws relating to fire protection for students?
- Will any new health and safety concerns arise due to the expansion?
- Appropriate materials that are not harmful to learners must be used. Any banned substances are not acceptable and shall render the school unsafe.
- Will contractors have new maintenance requirements and will they be able to handle the new scope of work at a larger school facility?
To find out more about what Higgins can offer when you’re expanding your school facilities, from project management and maintenance solutions to commercial painting contractors, download our free case study to see what we’ve done for some of our education customers.