Constructing Excellence in Wales

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When the Penyrheol Comprehensive School was significantly damaged by fire following an arson attack in March 2006 the immediate concern for the governors and local authority was to get the building functioning as an educational facility again as soon as possible.

Thanks to the efforts of everyone concerned it reopened with enough classroom accommodation in time for the start of the 2006/7 academic year but by then the focus had shifted from one of reaction to planning ahead for the long-term replacement of the fire damaged building.

“From day one the governors wanted a completely new school but we were limited by the funding. Any work could only be paid for through the insurance settlement,” explains John Fletcher, principal quantity surveyor at local authority the City and County of Swansea.

Although the authority had made tentative steps down the partnering route in the past, notably on primary school contracts in Swansea, the scale of the work required and the limited budget offered the ideal opportunity to fully embrace principles set out by Sir John Egan in his Rethinking Construction report and embrace Best Practice.

The Council’s first attempt at two stage tendering in partnership with the contractor and design team, through from inception AMP and on to contract, is a departure from ways it has implemented design and build contracts in the past.  At Penyrheol the client alongside main contractor Carillion and the design team has run a non-adversarial, open book style of project enabling all parties to have far more input to the delivery of the scheme. This has ensured there is a greater level of financial security across the project and that the client is getting more ‘bang for its buck’.

“We had our budget set at the start. Our contractor framework was set up so we had all the parameters in place. It is crucial to get those factors out of the way as soon as possible. If you can get to the stage where finances are out in the open then everyone knows where everyone else stands and almost immediately everyone is won over by the push to deliver the best possible scheme,” says Mr Fletcher.

By pushing the project down the partnering and best practice route the team is on the verge of delivering a school that not only replaces the old school buildings but improves on them – helping move educational facilities on from dated sub–20^th Century buildings into a state of the art 21^st Century establishment.

This was part of the raft of targets initially set by the project team when it began to look at the scheme in detail and included providing the facility within the £8.4 million insurance budget, re-instate the school buildings as soon as possible and as close to the target date as could be reasonably managed.

Central to the core of the Penyrheol delivery is the collaborative and team working approach it has taken. This has only been possible thanks to the willingness of all members to embrace the best practice agenda and communicate openly in the regular stakeholder meetings the project enjoys. These give the project team the opportunity to monitor progress at all levels of the scheme and enable potential problems to be addressed quickly and in most cases before they arise. Measurement of progress against targets is also vital if the project is to deliver against its targets and as such the team has been working against set Key Performance Indicators which have helped it monitor progress, not just of the entire scheme but also of individual slices of the project, including health and safety performance.

And the team is not averse to taking on-board advice from elsewhere. It has been liaising closely with a similar project at Queen Elizabeth School in Carmarthenshire in the hope that any lessons learned from that scheme can be passed on to the Penyrheol project.  It has also ensured that the handover between the project delivery team and the facilities management and maintenance teams is properly managed. By introducing a Handover Planning team those that will be involved in the day-to-day management of the building can experience it and offer in-put on the final delivery.

In the end though it is by harnessing the expertise of all members of the delivery team that the best practice processes can really be seen to deliver their most valuable work. As far as John Fletcher is concerned there is no other way to procure and carry out projects like the Penyrheol Comprehensive School scheme; it is one that will act as a blue print for other City and County of Swansea projects.

“It is by far the best way to go about these projects,” he says, “It is difficult to get people to look holistically to start with and the only way to do that is through effective communication between each of the stakeholders. Having a continual dialogue with your contractor and project team is the only way to build trust between each member and at the end of it all we get better value for money.”