Modernising Facility Management for Education Providers

Education facility management teams are responsible for some of the most demanding property portfolios in any sector. Whether managing a network of early learning centres or a large school campus, these teams must keep assets compliant, budgets under control, and environments safe — often with small teams, limited resources, and non-specialist centre managers making day-to-day requests. 

The stakes are high. Parents are entrusting providers with what they care about most. Regulators know it. Auditors reflect it. Yet many education organisations are still running their facilities operations on spreadsheets, email threads, and reactive maintenance processes that leave them exposed. 

The Real Challenges Education FM Teams Face 

The problems that hold education facility teams back aren’t always visible until something goes wrong. The most common pain points we hear from operators in the sector: 

• Supplier-controlled PPM schedules. When preventive maintenance is dictated by suppliers rather than the FM team, organisations lose control over timing and cost. You’re not planning — you’re reacting on someone else’s terms. 

• Communication gaps between centre managers and FM teams. Most centre managers aren’t FM professionals. When maintenance requests travel via email or phone calls, there’s no audit trail, no accountability, and no easy way to track whether an issue has been resolved. 

• Compliance documentation scattered across systems. For multi-site operators, keeping location, asset, and supplier compliance records in one place is critical. When that information lives across shared drives, inboxes, and spreadsheet tabs, audit preparation becomes a major time and risk exercise. The National Quality Framework sets out clear compliance obligations for education and care providers — and regulators audit against them regularly. 

• Reactive workloads crowding out proactive management. Without structured preventive maintenance, teams spend their time firefighting. That reactive burden is also a financial burden — unplanned repairs consistently cost more than scheduled ones. 

 

Why the Education Sector Can’t Afford to Stand Still 

Regulatory auditing in the education sector is frequent and rigorous, and it’s only becoming more so. As Duracube’s overview of compliance standards in Australian educational facilities highlights, compliance in education isn’t just about meeting legal obligations, it’s about creating environments that are safe, inclusive, and future-ready. Organisations need to be able to demonstrate, quickly and clearly, that every site is compliant, every asset is maintained, and every contractor is appropriately managed. That’s an almost impossible task when the information is fragmented. 

Beyond compliance, there’s a straightforward operational case. Education providers manage large, high-value property portfolios. Without accurate asset lifecycle data, replacement decisions are made on gut feel. Without visibility across sites, budget forecasting is guesswork. Without structured workflows, the same issues get re-reported, re-worked, and re-paid. 

What Most Systems Get Wrong 

Many education organisations that have moved beyond spreadsheets have landed on systems that were never designed for FM. Basic project management tools or simple ticketing systems can handle work order logging, but they don’t give you what you actually need: location-level compliance reporting, asset lifecycle data, centralised supplier records, or the kind of reporting that lets you make strategic decisions across a portfolio. 

The result is that teams end up maintaining workarounds alongside the system, which is barely better than having no system at all. 

What Modern Education Facility Management Looks Like 

A purpose-built FM platform connects every stakeholder, centre managers submitting requests, internal FM teams managing the schedule, and external contractors completing the work, within a single workflow. Urbanise FM is built around exactly this model, giving education operators a centralised system for operations, compliance, and reporting that scales with complex portfolios.

That means: 

• Every maintenance request, update, and resolution sits inside one work order. No chasing emails. No missed updates. 

• PPM schedules are set by the FM team, not the supplier. Annual maintenance plans can be built once and run automatically, covering both compliance tasks and routine servicing. 

• Asset data is live and actionable. Real-time lifecycle tracking means replacement decisions are based on actual condition and cost data, not assumptions. 

• Compliance is built into the workflow, not bolted on. Location and asset-level surveys ensure standards are consistently met, and all documentation is in one place when auditors come calling. 

• Reporting gives the full portfolio picture. Rather than compiling data manually, FM leaders can see performance, compliance status, and asset health across every site. 

  
  

The Easiest First Win: Take Back Control of Your PPM Schedule 

If you’re looking for a single change that will have an immediate impact, it’s this: stop letting suppliers drive your preventive maintenance schedule. 

Industry data has consistently backed what most FM professionals already know from experience: reactive maintenance costs significantly more than planned maintenance, and the gap compounds over time. Building a structured 12-month PPM plan, using a platform where it can be set up once and run automatically, changes the dynamic entirely. You dictate timing. You control which tasks are bundled to reduce call-out costs. You reduce the reactive workload that’s eating into your team’s time and budget.

And because your compliance tasks are built into the same schedule, you’re always audit-ready.  For many teams, this single operational shift delivers material cost savings alongside the visibility and control that wasn’t there before. 

Melbourne Girls Grammar Sees Success with Urbanise 

Melbourne Girls Grammar is one of the clearest examples of what modernising FM looks like in practice. Before adopting Urbanise FM, the school managed all service requests manually via email, with no reliable way to oversee SLAs, track job progress, or report on overall performance. Information was duplicated, paper trails were difficult to follow, and time was routinely lost to administration that a modern system should handle automatically. 

Since implementing the platform, tasks and requests are automatically assigned based on priority and available trade, with the FM team having full visibility over response times, job updates, and performance data in one place. Urbanise also completed a full asset verification of the campus at implementation, enabling real-time capital replacement forecasting based on each asset's expected life, condition, and criticality. 

The result is a facilities department that can now operate with the kind of transparency and accountability that school leadership expects. Access to live data across asset lifecycles, budget forecasting, planned maintenance, and compliance requirements has replaced the guesswork of the old system, this saved significant administration time and gave the team a single source of truth across the entire campus. Read the full case study here. 

See How Urbanise FM Supports Education Operators 

Urbanise FM is built around best-practice facilities management workflows, designed to give FM teams visibility, control, and the data they need to manage complex, multi-site education portfolios with confidence. 

Explore the Urbanise platform here or request a demo to see how it works in practice. 

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