How to Verify Contractor Work in a School

School maintenance has an awkward property: the work that most needs checking is the work
nobody was present for. Contractors come in during breaks, at weekends, after the last bus has
gone. The building is empty by design, which is exactly why they are there.

The result is that verification happens days later, by someone who did not brief the job,
against a description written by someone else, in a room that now has furniture back in it.

The fix is almost entirely at the front of the process, not the end.

Define done before they arrive

Most verification disputes are definition disputes. The contractor believes the job is what
they quoted. The school believes it is what they described. Both are acting in good faith and
the gap is never discovered until the invoice.

Before work starts, write down what finished looks like, in specific terms. Not "repair the
door" but "door closes and latches without being pulled, no gap at the top, handle secure on
both sides, no damage to the frame".

This takes five minutes and removes the entire category of argument. It also gives whoever
checks the following morning something to check against, which is the harder problem.

Write the check so a non-specialist can do it

The person verifying is often the site manager, an office administrator, or whoever unlocks the
building. They may know nothing about the trade involved.

So the definition has to be written for them. Anything that requires expertise to assess should
either be checked by someone with that expertise, or converted into something observable: does
it close, does it light, does it run, is there water where there should not be.

A checklist a caretaker can complete in four minutes will actually get done every time. An
expert inspection that needs scheduling will happen occasionally.

Photograph before they start

Take pictures of the area before the contractor arrives — not of the fault, of the surrounding
condition.

The reason is mundane and important: damage disputes. A scuffed wall, a chipped tile, a marked
floor near where work happened will otherwise be an unresolvable disagreement. Five photographs
of the working area beforehand resolves it in either direction, which protects the contractor
as much as the school.

Check the next morning, not at the end of the week

Verification degrades fast. A check done the following morning is against a fresh memory of the
brief and a room that has not yet been reoccupied. A check done on Friday is archaeology.

Build it into the opening routine of the first day after work. It belongs with unlocking rather
than with administration, because that is the moment somebody is physically there.

Record the outcome either way

Write down that the check happened and what it found — including when it found nothing wrong.

A record only of failures is ambiguous: an absence of entries could mean everything was fine or
that nobody looked. Two words, "checked, satisfactory", with a date and a name, converts the
log into evidence.

This matters particularly for work in schools, where the question of whether something was
inspected after completion may be asked much later by someone with a serious reason for asking.

Hold payment to the definition, not to the visit

Where you can, connect sign-off to the written definition rather than to the contractor having
attended. That is the whole leverage in the relationship and it is usually given away by
approving invoices on the basis that someone came.

Contractors generally find this reasonable, because the definition also protects them from
scope creep. The ones who object to a clear definition of done are telling you something
useful.

Feed repeat problems back into the brief

When the same job fails verification twice, the problem is usually the brief rather than the
contractor. Something about the requirement was ambiguous, or the underlying cause was never
diagnosed and the symptom keeps being treated.

Keep a note of jobs that failed a check. Three of them together will normally show you which of
your standing descriptions needs rewriting, which is a much better use of the information than
changing supplier.