Creative Learning Partnership Trust case study

Capita Entrust's energy management team worked with The Creative Learning Partnership Trust to align energy consumption and reduce costs.

The Creative Learning Partnership Trust is a growing and aspirational Multi-Academy Trust who started to work with Capita Entrust energy management team in 2023 to review the energy consumption across their academy network. The Energy Management team provides an end-to-end high quality and efficient service including energy procurement and account management. Thus, ensuring schools are purchasing energy at competitive market rates and that bills issued by suppliers are based on actual consumption and in line with agreed contractual rates. The team also offer an enhanced level of service that focuses on reducing energy wastage and providing enhanced data monitoring and budget information.

The approach

We worked with the Trust Operations Director to agree the main objective and vision for the Trust - to have a greater understanding of energy usage, how this is linked to building operations and empowering site staff to understand and take ownership of their individual building’s energy consumption.

The first stage was to understand and reduce weekend and out of hours gas usage, achieved by the implementation of a weekly warning process that advises individual sites of their spend on the previous weekend. We worked with the trust to develop a package of support and provided an enhanced level of energy budgeting with the team using all the available industry and market data. This included a bespoke view of each sites forecasted expenditure for the upcoming financial year. For the current financial year, we provided ongoing monitoring of spend to budget and where required re-forecasting of potential costs.

The team attended sites to provide further support and training tailored for the schools within the Trust, engaging with the site staff, business managers and the central team, and delivered training and guidance to the site supervisors to enable them to understand their heating systems and take ownership of utility usage.

Outcomes

We delivered an enhanced energy management service which focused on analysing the data collected via our Systems Link database to facilitate proactive actions to optimise energy usage and spend.  The energy management team recognised that collaboration was to ensure we kept fully engaged with the site staff as we identified they were key to this process in the future.

Reflecting on the consumption data, we achieved a stabilisation of weekend gas consumption across all academies. This allowed us to focus on academies that had hydro pools where we instigated a planned heating switch off to the pools over the weekend period. The results showed that for School 1 all heating was linked to the use of the hydro pool.

We also identified a specific academy which required immediate and a more bespoke investigative process as there was excessive usage resulting in higher than forecasted spend. This resulted in cost savings of over £1000 per weekend which would not have been identified until the invoices for consumption were received, which would likely have resulted in the finance team identifying spend more than their original budget. This is typically at 6 weeks after the usage has started due to the nature of energy billing cycles.

Looking ahead

The work completed enabled the trust to set new data benchmark which will be used as the methodology as we move into subsequent heating seasons. The energy management team will now be rolling out a similar process with the Trust regarding electricity consumption with an initial focus on understanding and reducing weekend base loads.

“This collaboration has supported the Trust which includes 8 academies to educate and promote a behavioural change with staff and pupils to take ownership of their actions in the future. Providing evidence to understand the impact of wasted energy costs. The results are key to working towards the net zero journey providing a strategic sustainability plan including priorities in the future.”
Laura Austen (Operations Director) and Amanda Wilkinson (Chief Finance Officer)

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