Supporting Carlton Academy Trust- Crysp property compliance management software

Carlton Academy Trust

Carlton Academy Trust is a Bradford-based multi-academy trust comprised of five schools: two secondary schools and three primary schools. Their mission statement is ‘Excellence For All’.

Carlton Academy Trust has an appointed Facilities and Compliance Director, Darren Harvey-Hill, who is responsible for overseeing all the compliance checks for each school within the Trust. He also assists with training on health and safety, risk assessments, and any other mandatory checks needed.

Having someone on board at the school who has an awareness of the health and safety legislation takes the burden off headteachers and senior leadership, so they can focus on their primary aim of teaching and supporting children’s learning.

The challenge

Over the last few years, all schools that make up Carlton Academy Trust have improved their Ofsted rating, following a long journey of improvement. One of the priorities has been securing the safeguarding for the senior leadership team of the Trust and the schools.

Managing compliance across multiple schools requires excellent organisation. A central system was needed to manage all documents, checks, communications, and reports.

Darren previously used a spreadsheet that he shared with senior leadership but found he spent a lot of time sifting through emails from the various school offices and caretakers. It took a long time to check and chase things manually. He also had to commute between the schools, checking when contractors had been and if compliance was all up to date.

Our approach

The Crysp team worked closely with Darren and other key Carlton Academy Trust stakeholders to gain an in-depth understanding of the Trust’s needs in terms of health and safety compliance.

We then developed and implemented our all-in-one compliance management digital portal to allow all documentation to be stored in one place and issues or required reviews to be flagged. The relevant stakeholders were trained on how to use this compliance management software.

The results

Every necessary document for all five schools is now part of a centralised platform with a traffic light system that indicates when reviews are needed.

Darren can now upload a service inspection report, and it’s automatically linked with the date and time it was certified, meaning it then gets flagged up on the calendar when it needs to be reviewed.

Darren no longer needs to commute between the five different sites in Carlton Academy Trust; he can simply log onto the Crysp compliance management platform and see the documents being uploaded by caretakers in real time. This allows him to see when the contractors have been and check the necessary documentation, so he can ensure everything is up to scratch without leaving the office.

The biggest difference Darren noticed from using Crysp was how a 20-minute meeting with a headteacher to go through all the compliance paperwork has transformed into a quick five-minute catch-up, which gets straight to the point.

For a headteacher, who needs to pull up the compliance documents before a governing body meeting, digitising and centralising all the school’s documents makes this job far easier.

What the Facilities and Compliance Director at Carlton Academy Trust had to say:

“There’s nothing to be scared of. The system is as user-friendly as possible, so even individuals who aren’t comfortable with IT can navigate it easily.” - Darren, Facilities and Compliance Director at Carlton Academy Trust

Darren has been so impressed with how Crysp has streamlined and improved the efficiency of the Trust’s compliance management processes that he is now working on taking their compliance management to the next level. As well as doing the statutory compliance checks through Crysp, Carlton Academy Trust is now developing forms that caretakers can fill in on a weekly basis. This means that anything from fire extinguisher checks to emergency light checks can be completed electronically.

The next step for Darren and his team is getting tablets, so they can have a centralised facilities support email that automatically generates an alert when needed. For issues such as a boiler breakdown, this would allow Darren to have a quick look at the images uploaded by the caretakers, and do a quick fix over the phone if possible. This would have a closing-out system as well, so staff can flag if and when an issue has been resolved.

Want to see more?

We hope this case study has helped you gain some insight into how Crysp works in practice, and how compliance can be easily managed within a multi-academy Trust.

Inspired to find out more about how Crysp can help you? To see how Crysp works in action and understand more about how our complete compliance management platform can transform your school’s health and safety, you can request your free Crysp demo here.