Partnerships for Schools

Developing an innovative benchmark performance management system

An innovative PA-developed system is ensuring value for money in England’s largest capital investment programme for schools in 50 years.

Partnerships for Schools (PfS) is responsible for delivering a 15-year programme that is rebuilding or refurbishing all of England’s 3,500 state secondary schools. PfS asked PA Consulting Group (PA) to design and build a bespoke benchmark performance management system with sufficient flexibility, at a fixed price and within six months.

To achieve this, PA helped PfS take a unique approach to benchmarking and performance management. For example, users need to amend data structures themselves without IT support and without affecting existing reports. Our solution was to work with Business Objects (the reporting product's vendor) to enable modifications of the data's structure without any need to change existing reports. No other Business Objects users had ever attempted this.

Already a third of local authorities are using the system and 11 deals have been concluded - the equivalent of £2.5 billion capital investment - in around 150 secondary schools.

Justin Slater, PfS's Director of Policy & Programme, said:
“Our partnership with PA has resulted in a completely new and pioneering approach to benchmarking – one that is equally applicable to other construction projects such as hospitals or MoD living accommodation. Quite simply, PfS could not operate and manage this programme without this system in place.”

Karl Hoods, Head of Information Systems, said:
“PA won the work because they demonstrated a real understanding of the problem, challenging our specification and identifying gaps. At the tendering stage, PA developed a demonstrator system that allowed us to visualise our concept and, in so doing, refine some of our specifications. We then worked with them to resolve issues that were highlighted – and that’s how we continued to collaborate throughout the project.”

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