Should You be Going Back to School?

While 80,000 extra school places have been provided in the UK over the past two years in line with predicted increases in the birth rate, the actual birth rate has been rising at a much high rate than anticipated.  As a result, unless the pace of school development and extension programmes picks up dramatically, the country could be heading for a crisis point where there simply is not enough space in our schools for the number of children.  The problem is particularly severe in the primary sector, which accounts for 240,000 of the 250,000 places needed and there are regional hotspots where the shortfall is predicted to be above 10% of places, including parts of London, Manchester, Bristol and Cambridgeshire. While all of this is worrying for education authorities who will have to find the budget to expand their school stock, and for parents who will have to compete for the available places, for the construction sector, this report could provide a golden opportunity.  Those contractors that have experience of working in a live school environment will be ideally placed to win tenders, while building products suppliers that can demonstrate how their products could reduce the length of programme or costs involved in constructing a school environment to modern standards could also win from this.

To make the most of this opportunity be sure to:

• Focus your marketing on local authority audiences
• Leverage any school projects experience
• Highlight any value engineering expertise
• Demonstrate ways in which you can add value and reduce timescales