22 January 2016 
Jane Harrison-White, Executive Director
Are universities making the most of their estates? If not, how could they do more?
Universities are making the most of their estates and student experience remains our priority. The sector has seen an increase in student numbers as well as the cap lifted this year. Investment spend increased last year, improving and maintaining estate and service quality and as a sector we continue to hold revenue costs. Awareness of varied estate challenges led AUDE to identify a set of key performance indicators to help us assess how effective our campuses are and where we can look to improve some of those indicators for a better estate.
What has been your biggest achievement at Oxford Brookes in terms of efficiency in estates?
We are just finishing a number of linked refurbishment and rationalisation projects that tick a number of boxes. We are bringing teams together, improving student facing services by location, consolidating vacated space for future large refurbishment projects, improving flexibility and space efficiency by an average of 18% on each sub project and improving our carbon efficiency.
What projects are you working on at Oxford Brookes?
We are tendering our next three key projects to improve teaching and research facilities for two of our faculties.
Our benchmark for quality and standards is our John Henry Brookes building and building on those principles we are creating more flexible learning zones for students and adopting a “long life- loose fit” approach to the refurbishments, thinking about the envelope and infrastructure to meet current and future needs.
Our carbon reduction commitment is key to our strategy – improving environmental efficiency with every project. We have been modelling whole life costing within projects to understand future revenue impacts and commitments.
We have been developing a residential strategy to address the particularly challenging situation that we have in Oxford. This will involve a major refurbishment plan as well as looking at other opportunities to balance the portfolio
The full article can been found here.
