Do you have measures in place to cope with such events?

Business continuity management (BCM) is a process that identifies and evaluates potential risks to an organisation and develops the organisation’s resilience by ensuring critical objectives are met and that the resources necessary to achieve those objectives are available. It involves you identifying your key activities and resources, deciding which are essential to the running of the school and planning how you would continue in the event of disruption or an emergency.
In December 2006 a Code of Practice, BS 25999 “Business Continuity Management” (BCM) was published with the aim of providing general guidance and advice on processes, principles and terminology for BCM in all areas and not just commercial offices. A later revision BS 25999-2:2007, Specification for BCM, was drafted to provide specific guidance on implementing, operating and improving BCM systems, which if complied with could be independently Certified by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS).

Why have a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?
There is no statutory requirement but there are various advantages in having a BCP:

• Planning helps you protect your essential activities and recover them in the event of disruption.
• It will provide confidence in your school’s ability to remain open if a potentially disruptive event were to occur.
• You will safeguard or even enhance your school’s reputation.
• You are demonstrating a duty of care to staff and pupils.
• You will instil confidence in the school governing body.
• You may have a competitive advantage over other school’s by having a reputation in being able to act swiftly in the face of all eventualities.
• You may have early warning mechanisms in place to deal with events, eg heavy snow fall.
• Insurance premiums may be reduced.
• It may assist you in complying with other legislation and regulations.

BCM Process
Based on the Code of Practice BS25999 BCM, there are five steps which have been simplified by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) www.thebci.org
Stage 1 – How do you start preparing a BCP?
The process starts with:
1. Getting buy-in from the leadership team by outlining advantages or benefits.
Appointing an overall co-ordinator for BCM, typically this will be the school business manager as they invariably have the best all around knowledge of the school site with access to all areas and staff. They will already possess some project management skills and are good communicators given the nature of their role.
Stage 2 – Deciding what to do
Once the BC coordinator is appointed and leadership team have bought into the need for a BCP, the next step is to establish what level of business continuity response is required.
Start this stage by making a list of :

• what business areas there are throughout the school; from education, catering to administration
• what processes are used from start to finish, eg food preparation, cooking, to serving
• what supplies are needed eg electricity, gas, stationery
• what premises, skills and equipment are required

Next, carry out a ‘Business Impact Analysis’ (BIA), ie think about what could affect the daily running of the school, eg if you could not get staff into school. You will need to assess how long you could do without something before it impacted on the running of the school. Be minded that some external influences may have a serious impact on the school. An example would be a food supplier who fails to turn up which means that pupils do not get fed which will have a knock-on effect on the performance of the pupils during that day.

How long could the school survive? Using your list of business areas, estimate how long you could do without it before it impacts on the running of the school. Make a list of how you could overcome the different types of disruption for one day, one week, one month or longer.

The business impact analysis will enable you to focus your risk assessments on the most urgent activities and their infrastructure. You should consider measures to reduce the likelihood or impact of a range of disruptive scenarios.

Once all the information is collated, you should be able to choose an appropriate strategy to enable each activity to be recovered before serious disruption or damage can occur to the school.
Alternative strategies you may consider include:

• whether it is possible to have access to another building, eg a local hall or leisure centre, in circumstances where the school is temporarily unable to be occupied
• what level of funding is available for back-up facilities, eg UPS battery backup systems for computer servers
• how much you can afford to lose,eg whether loss of a school block due to a flood could be accommodated by temporary use of staff rooms, library and hall as backup classrooms

You need to evaluate each risk and choose the strategy which best meets the need of each risk. Your choice may include:

• Do nothing and accept the risk, where your risk assessment shows low impact or probability.
• Decide how much time you need before you have to relocate to another location. This could involve developing a plan to relocate to a temporary location such as a leisure centre sports hall.
• Split locations. Some schools have split locations in terms of upper and lower schools, contingency plans could be put in place to use space in one or other site as a backup.
• Changing or ending the process ,eg using external catering provision where the kitchens are out of action because of a fire.
• Ignore the risk, which will leave the school vulnerable to the impact of unexpected loss of facilities which may result in closure.
• In evaluating your strategy you should also consider the following measures:
• Information backup strategies – consider using external online backup facilities where external companies will store all your computer data on their servers. This ensures that you can still access your school data even if you cannot access the school. Alternatively move to a “Cloud” platform.
• Insurance. Transfer the risk through insurance, which can provide financial compensation
• Loss mitigation, eg reduce the risk or eliminate it by installing smoke detection and fire alarms and keep anti-virus internet security software up to date on all computers.