Should a disaster occur at your school, possibly a fire or flood, it is vital that you have an up-to-date and validated business continuity plan to ensure that the school can recover. According to the Cabinet Office’s guidance document, ’How Resilient is your Business to Disaster’, “around half of all businesses experiencing a disaster and which have no effective plans for recovery fail within the following 12 months”.
While the school sector may be slightly different, the scale of the potential problem is clear. After all, what if parents withdrew their children from your school because they did not feel confident that you had sufficiently robust plans in place? The reputation of the school may be so badly damaged that interested parties no longer want to be associated with it.
About the plan:
- Provides an effective response to a crisis.
- Helps protect both staff and pupils.
- Helps protect the school’s reputation.
- Aid legal and regulatory compliance.
- Helps with contract compliance.
- Ensures the future survival of the school.
Assign roles and responsibilities to specific staff:
- Who will lead the plan? This is probably the head or chair of governors.
- Who will liaise with emergency services/HSE/insurance company? This is probably the SBM.
- Who will liaise with suppliers? This is probably the SBM.
- Who will inform parents/pupils?
- Who will liaise with the media? This is probably the head.
There are three key aspects to the plan:
- Strategic: identifying and prioritising the resumption of the most urgent services safely eg teaching.
- Tactical: determining the processes to do so.
- Operational: identifying and prioritising the specific activities required.
Key considerations:
- Teaching: how to continue educating the pupils? Will you need alternative premises or hire temporary classrooms?
- Administration: how can the school function? Where can admin support functions be located?
- Campus: where is the damage and can it be refurbished/rebuilt?
- Medical: counselling for affected parties.
- IT and data: has school data been backed up offsite?
- Equipment: is there provision for teaching materials to be replaced/borrowed (and budgeted for)?
- Is there a contingency in contracts for suppliers to respond quickly to emergency orders?
It usually takes around a year for a school to recover from this sort of disaster (if a school building happens to be listed, then three years is more likely).
To reassure parents, it is important that they can see that the school had prepared for such an eventuality with a solid plan. Then they are more likely to keep faith with your school and, therefore, you can emerge from the nightmare with your reputation and future viability intact.
