A guide to letting out your school & facilities

Letting out your school & facilities: the dos, don’ts and must haves

If letting out your school during evenings, weekends and holidays is something you’ve long considered but not yet managed to get off the ground, we’ve created this easy-to-follow guide to letting out your school & facilities to help you confidently jump into making additional revenue for your school. 

A guide to letting out your school & facilities

Before letting out your school & facilities, or advertising the fact, it’s good practice to carry out the following checks: 

• If your school is an academy, you’re encouraged to check your articles of association, as well as your funding agreement, for any rules and/or restrictions surrounding the letting of your facilities
• Speak to your Local Authority to ensure you understand and comply with any rules, regulations & restrictions surrounding school lettings
• If you run or work within a voluntary controlled, voluntary aided or foundation school, speak to anyone who has a stake in your land

And although this may all seem arduous, especially during the infant stages of lettings, it’s extremely important that you know exactly what you’re able to do and to offer to your community, as well as what you’re not. 

Alongside this is the simple importance of having the right conversations with the right people – making your intentions clear at the very beginning of the lettings process; as well as, of course, gathering all the information you need in order to push forward. 

Setting your rates by working out your costs, including overheads, is also an integral part of the school lettings process and something to be done early on in the process; ensuring bookings not only cover your costs, but also positively contribute to your school’s funds.  

In conjunction with this, clearly defining your premises hire policy and creating a template for repeated use is also strongly recommended. This helps both school and hirer use facilities with confidence. 

What’s more, creating, sharing and clearly displaying as much information about your school, its facilities available for hire and terms of use as possible – and making it easily accessible to potential hirers and interested parties – is crucial. You want to make the lettings process easy! Providing information will help you achieve this, as well as fielding frequently asked questions: consider creating a simple hirers’ guide and/or a hirers’ FAQs page on your website. 

Within this, it’s also good practice to create a specific landing page on your website, providing information about the spaces and facilities available for let. 

To support this online activity, creating a ‘lettings’ or ‘facilitieshire’ specific email address will help you to keep on top of bookings & enquiries specifically surrounding lettings; ensuring enquiries & bookings don’t get lost in the usual day-to-day communications. 

And don’t forget training! It may or may not always be applicable, but training staff members to adequately deal with the unique issues that come with community lettings is extremely important. 

Finally, managing your lettings! 

You’ll want to make sure any successful bookings are just that – a success. And, to do that, you’ll need someone (or a team of people) available to field enquiries & bookings, promote your school and facilities, arrange payment(s), and arrange for post-event clean up. There’s only so much you can manage in house, within your existing team. 

That’s where Schoolhire Solutions Ltd. can help; removing the responsibility from schools to find suitable hirers for their facilities, turning their spaces into much needed revenue, whilst also providing a perfect environment for local groups & clubs actively searching for venues for hire.

But, however you choose to launch your school lettings initiative, don’t forget to enter into the project with passion and excitement! 

Letting out your school & facilities is an effective way to bring much needed, additional revenue into your school, create and foster fantastic relationships with local businesses, and support your local community. 

To learn more about what we do and how we can help, please click here or contact us.

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