Education – Introduction to the market place

With all the emphasis on Decent Homes Standard, the growth in the supply of products to the education sector is often overlooked.

However, the growth in this market is every bit as extreme as in the social housing market, largely fuelled by the government's ‘Schools for the future’ programme – see article on this site.

As with all market sectors, working in schools brings its own challenges, often due to the timescales imposed by LEAs and individual schools to ensure that works are completed during school holiday periods.

Increasingly, the nature and scale of the projects is such, that working through term time is becoming a more regular request, and this in turn brings obvious challenges, not only of logistics and moving of classrooms to suit agreed programmes, but particularly the potential for health and safety issues to arise.

With the HSE increasingly looking to de-risk construction related projects, understanding the full requirements of working in this kind of environment is essential.

The potential rewards are huge however, with the government's commitment to schools running into the billions of pounds, over a 15 year period, providing long term lucrative opportunities for fabricators throughout the UK.