John Fraser outlines a scenario about a serious business continuity threat

 

A fire has spread through your school overnight. Several buildings have been seriously damaged, while others appear not to be usable for the near future. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the school campus is currently unusable. A brief communication has been issued via the emergency services and reshared via the school’s website, articulating the campus is closed. However, a small number of pupils who have arrived for the start of the school day are forced to return home, some in tears.

What should the school do next? Some immediate actions to consider:

• Where is the business continuity plan (BCP)? Is it accessible? Does the school have an up-to-date one?
• Has your crisis communications plan been enabled?
• Have you contacted your school’s insurers/insurance broker yet?
• Is the campus secure?
• Can any valuable assets be safely removed? Have they been removed?
• Is any part of the school usable, such as the sports ground?

Since no one was injured in the fire, what’s important here is limiting the scope of loss, that is, how the fire will affect the running of the school. This is where a school’s BCP comes to the fore. Most schools believe that they have one in place, but then find that they only have an incident management plan, and so may not have a strategy to keep school operations going.

Business continuity is a discipline that has organisational resilience as its core objective. Resilient schools are forward-thinking and can adapt to changing circumstances that could have a damaging effect on the school’s ability to function.

Why should your school have a BCP?

• It provides a predictable and effective response to a crisis.
• It helps protect people – both staff and pupils.
• It meets the disparate needs of all interested parties (regulatory bodies, governors, staff, pupils, parents, suppliers etc).
• It helps protect the school’s reputation.
• It can aid legal and regulatory compliance.
• It can help with contract compliance.
• It can help ensure the future survival of the school.
• It underpins the crisis communication support.

School governors and the senior leadership team (SLT) are responsible for ensuring an effective and up-to-date BCP is in place. Together they set the strategy and provide the financial support and resources for the implementation, ongoing management, and validation of the school’s plan.

When developing a plan, it’s vitally important to assign roles and responsibilities to specific, competent staff whose performance can be effectively monitored. Staff appointed to the plan must have appropriate training for their role. The number of staff required to support and manage the plan will depend on the size of the school, the range of services delivered, and its geographical location.

A member of the SLT should be accountable for ensuring that the plan is given the correct level of importance, that it is regularly reviewed – including governor oversight, and ultimately that it is effectively implemented.

Analysis

An essential part of the BCP is business impact analysis (BIA). This identifies, quantifies and qualifies the impact of an adverse event on a school. There are three levels of BIA:

• Strategic: this allows the school to identify and prioritise the resumption of the most urgent services and determine the school’s recovery timescales.
• Tactical: this enables the school to determine the processes required to resume teaching pupils.
• Operational: this helps to identify and prioritise the activities required at an operational level to maintain service delivery.

The purpose of your BIA is to:

• Identify the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD). This is defined as the time it takes for the adverse effects arising from an incident as a result of not providing a service to become unacceptable.
• Determine the priorities for recovery.
• Identify the dependencies and resources needed to achieve predetermined service levels.

A school’s MTPD may be reached when:

• Parents start to withdraw pupils from the school. In this case, because the school and its ability to teach, has been materially damaged by the fire.
• The reputation of the school may be so severely damaged that interested parties no longer want to be associated with it.
• The school ultimately becomes financially insolvent.

Tactics

The design of an effective plan requires a selection of tactics that can be deployed at the time of loss:

Staff

• Teaching: how can you continue educating the pupils?
• Administration: how can the school continue to function?
• Estates management: where is the damage and how can it easily be refurbished/rebuilt?
• Medical: were resources in place to help anyone affected by the fire either physically or psychologically?

Premises

• Teaching: can you initially deliver online, organise alternative premises, or hire temporary classrooms?
• Residential: if boarding is provided, can you rehouse pupils? Does the school have space for a temporary boarding house?
• Support functions such as administration, medical, marketing etc – where can they be located?

Resources

• IT: has all the school data been backed up off the premises?
• Data: is this accessible and can access be established?
• Equipment: is there a provision for teaching materials to be replaced/borrowed?
• Materials: have these been budgeted for?

Suppliers

• Is there a contingency in your contracts for your suppliers to respond quickly to emergency orders? Do you understand how your insurance will react in such a position?

Customers

• Third party hirers, summer schools etc – can they still continue on your premises? Will they need to be held elsewhere or cancelled?
• Clubs and societies: similarly, can they continue to function in the short term?
• Pupils and staff: what help will they require, such as emotional support or counselling? Reassurance that the alternative classrooms will be adequate?

The main outcomes from designing a continuity framework will be:

• A set of continuity and recovery strategies and tactics agreed by the school governors and SLT.
• A design for continuity and recovery that will be used in developing the school’s actual incident-specific BCP.
• Agreeing projects for implementing the agreed strategies and tactics.
• A clear communications plan to support the BCP.

To be of use, the school’s BCP must balance the need for time-based direction and adaptability to respond to different loss scenarios (not just fires), but it must also be concise (that is, contain information that will only be used by teams when responding to a disruptive incident) and be up to date. For instance, does the local fire brigade have a copy of a plan of the school premises so that they know where they can position their engines to connect their hoses to water supplies?

Validation

How does your school know if its plan is fit for purpose? Validation through testing only confirms it meets the objectives set out by the school’s governors and SLT and that the school’s plan is fit for purpose.

A planned exercise is an essential element of the validation process to ensure that your school’s response to an incident is appropriate. All information contained in the documentation needs to be verified, the plan needs to be rehearsed, and all relevant staff should participate in a controlled exercise.

Tabletop exercises

This is where a discussion is based on a particular loss scenario with an agreed timeline that may be in real-time or be compressed to allow distinct phases of the scenario to be played out.

To be effective prior to starting an exercise, all staff should be fully briefed and be aware of what is required of them. This will include understanding their roles and responsibilities during the exercise.

To make it as realistic as possible, ‘injects’, that is, additional bits of information can be introduced by the facilitator, which may require participants to reconsider the options available to them during the exercise. For example, while the plan may have been successfully executed, an alternative story may be playing out on social media. How does your crisis communication plan address those challenges?

At the end of any exercise, a debrief should be held to establish whether the objectives have been met and to allow participants to share their experiences so that lessons can be identified and incorporated into the revised plan.

Maintenance

It’s important that the school keeps its BCP up to date. Maintenance activities include:

• Lessons learned from a practice exercise.
• Changes in the school environment such as buildings or access.
• Results of a formal audit.
• The outcome of a previous real incident either at your school or lessons from elsewhere.

A fire is not the only event that can seriously affect a school’s operations. Climate change has been blamed for a significant increase in the incidence of flooding, a school’s IT system is always vulnerable to a cyberattack, or a pandemic could leave a school with too few staff to function effectively – the list goes on. However, a robust and well tested BCP will provide a school with the most favourable platform for a swift return to normal operations.

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Crisis comms: how to tell your story

In addition to developing a business continuity plan (BCP) to address the operational impact of the fire, the school should also focus on crisis communications. Here are some actions to consider:

• Does your school’s insurance include an element of crisis communications cover? Has your school retained the services of a specialist communication expert?
• Coordinate with emergency services: The school should work closely with the emergency services to ensure a coordinated communications response.
• Issue a media update: It’s important to communicate proactively with the media to provide accurate information about the fire and its impact on the school. This will help prevent any potential misinformation on social media and address any concerns or rumours about the cause of the fire.
• Communicate with stakeholders: The school should also communicate with all relevant stakeholders, including staff, governors, pupils, parents, regulatory bodies and suppliers. This will help manage expectations, provide updates on the situation, and address any concerns or questions they may have.
• Provide emotional support: The school should prioritise providing emotional support to the affected pupils and staff. This may include counselling services, reassurance about alternative classrooms, and addressing any concerns they may have about the continuity of their education.
• Maintain the school’s reputation: Crisis communications should focus on protecting the school’s reputation. This can involve addressing any negative perceptions or assumptions about the adequacy of the BCP and demonstrating the school’s commitment to resilience and recovery.

Overall, effective crisis communications will help manage the impact of the fire on the school community, maintain trust and confidence, and support the successful implementation of the BCP.

 

John Fraser is managing director of the education practice at insurance brokers Marsh