EDUCATION EFFICIENCY
ESTABLISHING EFFICIENT PROCUREMENT ROUTES The Education Funding Agency (EFA) is playing a central role in revitalising schools across the UK with offsite techniques and modular buildings playing a major part. Blacc Consulting’s Richard Crosby now leads the team making it all happen. He took some time out of his busy schedule for a quick Q&A on what offsite can deliver. Q: How did you become involved with working with the EFA and become its ‘modular champion’? The EFA’s Priority School Building Programme (PSBP) team were struggling to get contractor interest in a number of primary schools through existing procurement routes and needed to explore options to widen the market. I was asked to take a look at what alternatives there were and come up with a procurement strategy. We identified that a volumetric-led approach was one option that could be developed and used not only for immediate requirements but also for the PSBP2 programme which is a more block-based programme. This needed a different type of procurement approach to that used previously by the EFA and had to be adapted to suite the nature of the offsite industry’s business and not just use a procurement process designed for traditional contracting.
Q: What is your day-to-day role for the EFA? I provide consultancy services to help the EFA to build great schools. Part of that is identifying that procurement and design for offsite construction techniques can help hugely, so I am working with procurement and delivery teams to create solutions that enable schools to achieve quality bespoke buildings and ‘drive value’ by identifying the elements behind the offsite building process where efficiencies can be gained. The idea received a rather mixed response when first cited almost three years ago. There had been perception issues with quality of offsite delivery and costs but the EFA fully understood it had needed to develop alternative procurement routes to meet a changing world. Mike Green and Rachel Stephenson from the EFA’s Capital Board have been incredibly supportive in letting me see what these routes can do.
Richard Crosby is Head of the EFA’s modular & offsite construction framework. He will be presenting at the Explore Offsite Education event in Westminster on 18 May. Book your ticket at: www.exploreoffsite.co.uk
46
WWW.OFFSITEMAGAZINE.CO.UK | SPRING 2017
1
2 Q: How central to the overall PSBP programme are offsite methods and in particular modular construction? The EFA have been using various offsite solutions via their main contractor and regional framework for some time. These were developed in response to Sebastian James’ report Review of Education Capital in 2011, using their baseline design and batched procurements. I have been building on that and designing a procurement strategy to suit the modular and offsite providers to give access directly to them rather than via a main contractor. This is only part of the solution as main contractors will still be needed on refurbishment schemes in particular but they will need to push the boundaries to drive out efficiencies in such a large programme of work. Offsite can help to improve efficiency, cost and quality and importantly in live school environments, it can reduce disruption time and improve H&S management. The industry has banged the drum for a long time on this, but it needs clients to examine how they do things and change how they manage their programmes. The EFA have started to see this and are responding really well.