How to Collect Facility Issues From Teachers and Staff

A school generates a steady stream of small building problems and almost no time in which to
report them. A teacher notices a broken blind at the start of a lesson and is fully occupied
for the next hour. By break there are three other things to deal with, and the blind is
forgotten until it is noticed again the following week.

This is not negligence. A teaching day has no natural gaps, and any reporting method that
requires a gap will fail.

Design for ten seconds

The realistic budget for reporting a broken blind is about ten seconds, taken at the moment of
noticing. Anything that needs a login, a desktop, or navigation through a menu is outside that
budget and will be deferred, and deferred means forgotten.

That constraint rules out most of what gets proposed. It usually leaves one of three things: a
message to a known number or address, a shared group, or a physical book in a place everyone
passes.

Pick whichever fits how your staff already communicate. The channel staff are already in beats
the better channel they are not.

One destination, widely known

Whatever you choose, there should be exactly one of it, and every member of staff should be
able to name it without looking it up.

Two destinations is functionally zero, because the thing you are looking for is always in the
other one, and because staff who are unsure which to use will often use neither.

Put the destination on a sticker in every staff room and workroom. Repeat it at the start of
each term. This is duller than designing a system and it matters more.

Three fields, no more

Ask for the room, the problem, and who is reporting. Nothing else.

The room is non-negotiable in a school — buildings are full of near-identical spaces and "the
broken window" is unresolvable across forty classrooms. If your rooms have numbers, insist on
the number rather than "the science lab at the end".

Who reported it matters for the closing step, not for accountability. You need someone to tell
when it is fixed.

Every additional field reduces the number of reports you receive, and the reports you lose are
disproportionately the small ones — which are the ones that are cheap to fix now and expensive
to fix later.

Let photographs do the describing

A photograph from a phone carries more accurate information than a written description, takes
less time, and removes the guesswork about what exactly is broken.

Encourage them. A picture of a cracked tile answers questions the reporter would not have
thought to answer, and it lets whoever picks up the job arrive with the right part rather than
making a diagnostic visit first.

Acknowledge, even when you cannot act

Staff stop reporting when reports appear to go nowhere. This is the most common failure in
schools and it is entirely self-inflicted.

A short acknowledgement is enough, and it does not need to promise anything. "Got it, this one
will wait until the holidays" is a perfectly good reply, far better than silence, and it
prevents the same issue being reported three more times by three more people.

Separate urgency from importance at intake, gently

Some things need somebody now: water on a floor, a door that will not secure, anything creating
a hazard where children are.

Make one thing explicit — how to flag those, and that flagging them is always acceptable. Staff
who are unsure whether something is urgent will often not report it at all rather than risk
overreacting.

Everything else can wait for a triage pass. Do not ask the reporter to categorise beyond that
single distinction.

Read the list with the calendar in hand

Schools have a rhythm nothing else has: the building is occupied when work is hardest and empty
when it is easiest. A list read against the term calendar produces a very different plan from
the same list read in date order.

That is a separate discipline, covered in this pathway's guide on prioritising around teaching
hours. For intake, the only thing that matters is that the report exists and can be found.

When the book stops working

A physical book works well in a single-building school with one office. It starts to fail
across multiple buildings, when several people need to see it at once, or when the question
becomes "what is still outstanding in the science block?" rather than "what came in today".

At that point a shared log — a spreadsheet, or something that structures the messages staff
already send — earns its place. The three fields do not change.