Summer Estates Projects

This week, we continue our theme of summer estates projects by focusing on the replacement of boilers in three schools: Boringdon, Chaddlewood, and St Breward. These boilers, which provide heating and hot water, were in poor condition, leading to rising maintenance costs, poor gas efficiency, and difficulties in sourcing spare parts. This situation posed a significant risk of boiler failure, which could prevent our schools from opening. Additionally, Ermington is scheduled to have its boiler replaced during the October half term.

Before the installation, the Estates team ensured all preparations were complete. This included having a mechanical and electrical design in place, conducting asbestos surveys, agreeing on a construction phase plan, and carrying out a tender process to secure the best value for money. These steps were crucial in meeting all procurement regulations for Estates projects.

Our contractor faced a significant challenge in replacing three boiler systems within six weeks, particularly due to converting the system at St Breward from oil to gas.

The new boiler systems are more compact and significantly more efficient. They use less gas and feature a modular setup, where multiple smaller boilers replace one large unit, further enhancing efficiency. While transitioning to electric heating would be ideal, it is currently not feasible for these schools. However, this will be considered in the future.

The projects ensure reduced energy use and costs, increased longevity of the boiler system, and reliable provision of heating and hot water for the schools. Additionally, these improvements significantly reduce maintenance costs.

Although the projects are complete there are still outstanding tasks, such as closing out any snagging items, operations and maintenance manuals (O&Ms) to be completed, agreeing any variations to costs to finalise the account for each project. 

Many of you have not been in our boiler rooms, so enjoy the photos of these projects.

Important Data Protection information - Action needed by all staff

Our email storage policy is changing. From January 2026, no email will be stored in Microsoft Outlook for longer than 2 years. This means that:

• All emails of 2 years old or more will be automatically deleted from Outlook on 6 January 2026.

• From then onwards, all emails will be automatically deleted from Outlook 2 years after you receive them.

All staff using Microsoft email need to back up essential emails and/or attachments that are needed long-term to an appropriate storage area (like OneDrive).

The deadline to complete this before the Christmas holiday is 18 December 2025. 

Any emails not backed-up outside of Outlook by then will be lost permanently.

Please click here to see our detailed guidance.

(For now, Callington and Chaddlewood staff using Google Mail rather than Microsoft are exempt, but this will apply when your email is transferred to Microsoft in the future. Separate Google Mail guidance will follow, but consider proactively backing up any important emails from now on.)

Please start thinking and acting on this as soon as possible! Once you have read the guidance linked above, if you are concerned or confused please book onto a support session using the form at the bottom of the guidance page.