Business costs for nurseries and schools

Space heating is the largest cost in most education settings, because young children are sedentary and buildings are frequently older, high-ceilinged and poorly insulated. The saving people miss is the holidays: heating and ventilation schedules are often left on term-time settings through a six-week summer break and every half term, which is weeks of a full heating programme running for an empty building.

• Audit your heating and ventilation schedule against the actual term calendar, including INSET days and half terms.
• Frost protection is what an empty building needs, not comfort heating.
• Kitchens, where you cook on site, carry their own extraction and refrigeration profile.
• If you are half-hourly metered, your peak is the morning warm-up — capacity should be sized to that, and after any building work it frequently is not.

Nurseries generate a substantial nappy and hygiene waste stream that is classed as offensive waste rather than clinical, and it needs a licensed carrier and correct packaging. Schools generate high volumes of paper and card, food waste where meals are served on site, and general waste — all with a volume that collapses during holidays while the collection schedule usually does not.

• Offensive/hygiene waste in early years settings — a licensed route, and cheaper than clinical waste, so check you are not being charged clinical rates.
• Food waste where meals are prepared or served on site.
• Paper and card recycling, which is the dominant volume in schools.
• Ask whether your carrier will suspend or reduce collections during holidays — a fixed schedule across a six-week summer is pure waste.

For any setting working with children, abuse and safeguarding cover is the section that determines whether a serious claim is met. It is frequently excluded or heavily sub-limited on generic commercial policies, and the limit is the thing to establish in writing before comparing premiums at all.

• Abuse and safeguarding — get the sub-limit in writing. This is not a section to accept on default terms.
• Employers’ liability — legally required, including for apprentices and students on placement.
• Public liability — check limits against any local authority funding agreement, which frequently specifies a minimum.
• Professional indemnity — relevant where educational advice or assessment is provided.
• Contents and equipment — play equipment, IT and specialist resources.
• Business interruption — a closure has an income effect that continues past reopening, because places take time to refill.

Education settings have safeguarding duties around filtering and monitoring of internet access, so the connectivity conversation is not just about bandwidth. Alongside that sits practical demand: cloud-based learning platforms, parent communication apps, CCTV, door access and registration systems.

• Confirm what filtering and monitoring your provider supports and how it is evidenced — you may be asked to demonstrate it.
• Separate networks for staff, learners and guest or parent access.
• Business fibre suits most single-site nurseries; larger schools with heavy concurrent device use are where a leased line becomes worth costing.
• Check what happens to door access and registration systems during an outage — for a setting responsible for children, that is a safeguarding question, not an IT one.