The list of MAT compliance activities is long, and it’s only growing. MATs are continuing to expand and take on more academies – or hoping to, soon. Keeping staff and sites compliant is a daily task, one we know can cause sleepless nights. But it doesn’t have to!
We’ve rounded up how MATs are using our school compliance manager, Every Compliance By IRIS, to feel compliant and confident this winter. Read on to learn how your trust would benefit from:
- Standardising compliance across academies (from documents and policies to health and safety tasks)
- A snapshot overview of compliance levels across all sites in a single place
- Tools that reduce the risk of human error in compliance tasks
Why MATs need to standardise compliance
First things first, are all staff singing off the same hymn sheet when it comes to compliance? With hundreds of tasks to carry out and monitor, clear communication is key to avoid confusion which could affect compliance levels in your schools.
If you still rely on fleeting corridor conversations (that remind your estates team to follow-up on a site compliance issue), your MAT is vulnerable to forgetfulness, and human error. Every Compliance provides a central place to record, track, and review compliance activities across all the schools in your trust. You’ll soon find tasks that were once missed due to forgetfulness become a thing of the past!
How Every Compliance works
A teacher can easily log an issue they’ve spotted in their classroom, which gets flagged and assigned to the relevant team to investigate and resolve. For instance, a broken window lock which affects site security – and related compliance around keeping students and staff safe. You can configure Every Compliance to send automated email reminders to the relevant people if the task is outstanding, meaning activities aren’t forgotten (as they could be if they’re jotted down in-between jobs).
Standardised MAT compliance tasks are a huge time-saver, too. Your MAT’s school buildings will all require the same planned checks, so why waste time asking each school to set up its own process for ensuring these are carried out? Naturally, there’ll be some buildings that require extra checks (due to factors like their age or location). With Every Compliance, you can standardise documents and processes, then customise these to meet individual needs.
Best risk management for MATs
With a consistent structure for compliance activities across all schools in place, it’s time to understand what the data is telling you. Take risk management as an example. How do you know if a risk has been recorded, then tolerated or treated?
Forget numerous spreadsheets for each school to store risks in. You want to be keeping all your MAT’s risk information in one place, so the right people have access to the right information at the right times to make proactive decisions and interventions – and prevent risks turning into incidents.
Schools that use Every Compliance for risk management benefit from red-amber-green (RAG) ratings for each individual risk. The RAG-ratings are presented on a MAT-wide risk dashboard, giving you a snapshot view of what’s threatening risk-related compliance. You can then drill-down into the individual risk’s details, aiding a swift yet informed response.
Planned maintenance and checks
The same RAG-rated reporting applies to planned maintenance and checks, too. With the best will in the world, you’ll always find an issue with checks across your sites and assets, be it one was missed or the engineer forgot to turn up! Recording the checks that are still outstanding, reason(s) why, and who’s responsible for making sure they happen, is best practice to ensure they’re carried out in the future.
With Every Compliance, you can also add dates and times of past and upcoming visits, supporting files (like documents and photos), and notes to each asset, site, or maintenance task’s file, so you’ve got a current source of truth. If needed, this can then be turned into a report and used as evidence. For instance, if the boiler engineer forgot to supply the certification you need to meet the requirements of your upcoming health and safety audit.
No need to remember to remember
Our aim for Every Compliance has always been to simplify your working day. We know that human error is one of the biggest (yet understandable) risks to upholding compliance across your MAT. But the beauty of our digital compliance manager is it limits the chance of errors, with features like:
1. ‘Read’ reminders
Automate and customise ‘read’ reminders to groups of staff or individuals to make sure important policies and documents, like KCSIE 2024-2025, have been acknowledged (and signed, if necessary).
2. Automated maintenance reminders
As standard, Every Compliance notifies users of upcoming planned works at both 12 and 4 weeks before they’re due to happen. You can tweak these settings to suit your entire MAT or individual school needs, helping you to keep on top of works.
3. User-friendly dashboards
With our RAG-rated reporting tool, you can quickly see issues or outstanding tasks relating to compliance – that you may otherwise have forgotten!
Whilst MAT compliance can feel daunting, it can also feel organised, controlled, and streamlined. To positively change how your schools manage and report on compliance, book your free demonstration of Every Compliance.
