Our core service is the fully managed service, in which we take full responsibility for every aspect of community use at your school. We at Schools Plus have developed a unique set of procedures and tools which enable us to maximise your school’s potential for extended use, whilst minimising the administrative burden to you. The entire operation is run by your Venue Manager and their team, including recruitment, marketing, facility preparation and cleaning, service delivery, security, and payment processing.
Key Outcomes
Through implementing these we:
- Promote use of your facilities, transforming your school into a thriving community hub, open 7 days a week
- Deploy our full range of marketing tools and relationships with numerous providers to ensure growth
- Engage with local service providers and co-ordinate their delivery at your site, for instance the local council, the NHS, and the police
- Fulfil any obligations you may have for community use, for instance for Specialist Status and Lottery Grants
- Cover all costs associated with community use of your school
- Pay you according to an agreed formula, increasing annually until we achieve maximum use
- Ensure the seamless integration of all these activities around school activities, so that the core purpose of the school is uninterrupted
Team
At the heart of our service is a dedicated team of trained staff. Although employed by us, they are deployed at your school and subject to your approval. In many ways, they operate as an extension to your existing team, so that they become as much a part of your operation as your directly employed staff.
The team are led by the Venue Manager, who is a highly competent and trained professional. Often they will have considerable previous experience with us, either as a Venue Manager at another site or as a member of our staff who has successfully achieved promotion through our internal development programme. We are very proud of our Venue Managers, and you can get to know them better by seeing their dedicated pages for each individual school.
Operational Risk Reduction
Bringing hundreds or even thousands of people onto your school site carries with it the inevitable risk of things going wrong – damage to classrooms or equipment that are needed the following day; mess and dirt; clashes with school activities; and so on.
Our standard operating procedures, reinforced by on-the-job training, development opportunities, and close supervision and guidance from very experienced area managers, together can give you the confidence that the level of operational risk can be reduced to a minimum.
In addition, this operational strength gives us – and you – the confidence to permit more challenging uses, such as film location hire, accommodation, events and markets.
Financial Risk Reduction
As part of our service to you, we take on the financial risk associated with community use and lettings.
To start with, we cover almost every cost associated with these activities. The cost of staff is clearly the main one, but in addition we cover the cost of marketing, IT, cleaning and so on. In fact the only costs we do not cover are invisible wear and tear; and incremental utility costs. This is for the pragmatic reason that we have not found a reliable and cost effective way to measure these, and so ask you to regard them as covered in our licence fee to you.
In addition, we carry the risk of any financial default on behalf of our customers. Thus we will pay you for any invoiced booking that takes place, even if the customer fails to pay us. The revenue share arrangement means that the bad debt risk sits with Schools Plus. Likewise, we will reimburse you promptly for any damage to or theft of your property caused by our customers; it is our responsibility then to deal with the persons responsible for the damage directly for settlement.
Finally we handle all the payment processing, literally hundreds of payments to us every week from numerous sources varying from a few tens of pounds to tens of thousands of pounds.
Income Maximisation
Once a strong team with robust procedures are in place, we can then promote the facilities, confident that we can welcome a flow of new customers smoothly, safely, and without interruption to the school day.
Our Venue Manager is dedicated to running and developing the business in your school. They have the time and commitment to build the business, and they are encouraged – and incentivised- to grow the lettings. With guidance from their Area Manager, the Venue Manager can actively increase both the number and quality of inquiries – and convert them to sale.
Each site also benefits from our company’s marketing skills and tools which are deployed as appropriate. In addition, we have long term relationships with major, multi-site customers, with whom we are able to substantially increase the amount of lettings business.
Where a school has an existing income, we are able to make you a financial guarantee to maintain your net income, so that the only way is up.
In this way we convert a fragmented opportunity with numerous variable costs into a completely secure, well organised and often substantial income stream for you.