Construction company appointed for three schools

BAM Construction has been appointed to build three new schools in Leicester and Derby. The scheme is valued at about £65m.

The school in Derby is the Derby Cathedral School, a 1,200-place school. The site is planned to have a three-storey building and a separate sports block.

One of the Leicester schools is Castle Mead Academy. This is a brand new academy. The other Leicester school is Avanti Fields School, which is a Hindu faith school opens to any students. The additions will result in two primary classes and 26 nursey places.

The school are intended to be completed and ready to open for the 2021 autumn term.

Regional director Dave Ellis said: “Education is an integral part of our story at BAM. How we go about our work for schools, colleges and universities is a reflection of our consistent collaborative culture, while it also shows the transformative digital construction techniques we employ, as we move towards standardised components and more off-site assembly techniques for example.

“These schools will all benefit from our ability to integrate both construction and design so that we maximise the educational benefits for the pupils and teachers, and consider the needs of their respective communities.

“I’m always pleased when we get to build in the East Midlands, where we built the new headquarters for Derby County Council, and we won our first contracts in Leicestershire in 1955, so our local people, our pedigree and track record here are considerable.”

Many construction contractors and clients require contractor staff to hold and display Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) smart-cards, which prove their qualifications, before allowing them on site.

Here at Time and Attendance Midlands, we are an IT partner of the CSCS through our parent company, Tensor plc. This means that we can provide seamless integration between the CSCS smartcard and our WinTA.NET software, which provides time management, visitor/contractor management and fire/evacuation roll-call systems.

The integration takes the end-user form of a CSCS “card wizard”. This set of rules allows a company to quickly grant construction contractors recognition by and access to our hardware, such as clocking terminals, turnstiles, and door controllers. The wizard will run one of three scenarios when giving access rights to contractors. These are:

  • Contractors who are completely new to the system.
  • Contractors whose name exists on the system but their CSCS card has not been entered.
  • Contractors who are fully recorded on the system and have used their card at other sites, but are new to this particular site.

For each different scenario the wizard will guide the user through the enrolment procedure. The result is that:

  • The contractor’s CSCS card is read (using a USB card reader attached to a Tensor.NET Client PC)
  • Details are extracted from the card to update the contractor’s details within the system
  • Options such as a company, site, shift group and department are assigned to the cardholder

To make it easier to include new contractors in your site’s existing health and safety and security procedures, please contact us today. We can handle any size site: our Enterprise software is able to perform for global, multi-site corporations with thousands of employees/users, while our Start edition helps small businesses with less than 50 users.