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Most of our largest work is not a single hall. It is an academy trust with eleven schools, a leisure operator with six centres, or a local authority with a portfolio of buildings that have never been assessed together.
Courtship Flooring surveys whole estates, produces a single consistent specification and a packaged price, then delivers the programme with one point of contact throughout. Established 1987, commercial contractor, nothing subcontracted, and the same standard applied at every site.
Estates almost always contain floors in wildly different condition: one hall needing full replacement, three needing sanding and sealing, four needing nothing more than a deep clean and reline. Priced one at a time by different contractors, that becomes a mess of inconsistent specifications and prices.
We survey them together, with moisture readings and board measurements at every site, and produce a single written report ranking what needs doing now, what can wait a year, and what needs only maintenance. That report is designed to be usable as budget evidence.
Trusts and operators do not want work dragging across three summers. Once the specification is agreed we schedule the estate into a single programme, typically across a summer break or a defined series of overnight and weekend slots, with each site given a firm start and reopening date.
Because we do not subcontract, the same team and the same standard turn up at site eleven as at site one. That consistency is the main thing clients tell us they were missing before.
Institutional work comes with institutional requirements, and we handle them as a matter of course rather than as an afterthought: method statements, risk assessments, insurance documentation, CDM compliance where a project falls under it, and DBS considerations where work takes place in schools.
Each site receives its own documented handover, including pendulum slip test reports where specified, so the duty-of-care file is complete across the whole estate rather than patchy.
The value of getting an estate onto a single specification is that it then stays there. Rolling maintenance plans cover annual deep cleans, condition inspections, recoating at the right moment, repairs and relining across every site on one schedule and one invoice.
It prevents the drift that produces the original problem: eleven floors, eleven different histories, and nobody quite sure which one is about to fail.
Managing sports floors across twenty schools is a different problem from managing one, and the organisations that do it well treat it as a programme rather than a series of emergencies.
The starting point is a condition survey of every floor in the estate. We visit each site, record the construction, the remaining wear layer, the condition of the finish and the structure, the state of the markings and any moisture concerns, and we photograph everything. That produces a single document showing what you own and what condition it is in.
From there we build a priority order. Some floors need work this year because they are unsafe or because the finish has worn through and the boards are being damaged. Some can wait three years. A few need nothing beyond routine maintenance. Knowing which is which is what turns an unpredictable cost into a plannable one.
The programme then phases the work across budget years, taking each hall out of use at the quietest point in its own calendar rather than trying to do everything in one summer. That spreads the spend, and it means you are never in the position of having six halls all fail at once.
Multi site work makes sense wherever one organisation is responsible for several sports floors, and in practice that means a fairly consistent set of clients.
Academy trusts are the largest group. A trust with fifteen or twenty schools has fifteen or twenty sports halls, usually of wildly differing ages and construction, and almost never a single record of their condition. That is exactly the situation a rolling programme is designed for.
Local authorities and leisure operators are the second. Council leisure estates and the operators who run them on contract typically hold a mixture of sports halls, studios, squash courts and fitness suites, often with contractual obligations about facility standards that make documented condition and testing genuinely important.
Universities and colleges follow the same pattern across a campus, with the added complication that the academic calendar leaves very specific windows.
We also work with facilities management providers and main contractors as the specialist flooring element within larger estate contracts, which is a straightforward arrangement provided everyone is clear about scope from the outset.
The advantage of a single contractor across an estate is consistency, and that is worth more than most organisations expect.
The same specification is applied everywhere, which means the same seal systems, the same preparation standards and the same marking colours and dimensions across every hall. Staff moving between sites find the same floor, and procurement is comparing like with like rather than a different specification each time.
Documentation is standardised too. Every site gets the same paperwork: method statements and risk assessments before the work, product data sheets and cure times at handover, aftercare guidance in the same format, and pendulum slip resistance certificates where they have been requested. That matters when a trust or an operator has to demonstrate a consistent duty of care across an estate rather than site by site.
It also means the condition data stays current. Each visit updates the record, so the survey does not go stale and next year priority order is based on what the floors are actually doing rather than what they were doing when the programme started.
Multi site work is usually procured formally, and we are used to the process rather than resistant to it.
We tender for framework agreements and we price on schedules of rates as well as job by job. A rate based arrangement suits estates where the volume is known but the individual jobs are not yet defined, and it removes the need to run a procurement exercise for every hall.
Where a formal tender is involved we provide the full documentation set: insurances, method statements, quality procedures, references from comparable estates, environmental information and safeguarding arrangements for staff on school sites. We would rather submit that once, properly, than be chased for it.
On pricing, volume genuinely does reduce cost per site, because mobilisation is spread and the programme can be sequenced efficiently rather than every job being a standalone mobilisation. We will show that in a proposal rather than simply asserting it.
Payment and budget phasing can be arranged to land in the financial years you need it to, which is often as important as the total figure.
The real saving in a multi site programme is not in the refurbishments, it is in avoiding them.
A floor that gets a light screen and recoat every two to three years may never need another full sand. A floor that is left until the seal has worn through to bare timber will need a full refinish, and it will have lost some of its remaining wear layer permanently in the meantime. Across twenty sites that difference is substantial money.
So a proper programme includes scheduled maintenance visits rather than only capital works. Deep cleaning, screen and recoat, minor board repairs, remarking where lines have worn and an annual condition inspection that updates the estate record.
The inspection is the part clients tell us they value most, because it converts an unpredictable estate risk into a short written report per site with a clear recommendation and a rough cost. That is something a business manager can put in front of a board, and it is considerably better than discovering in July that a hall cannot open in September.
The part of a multi site arrangement clients tell us they value most is not the flooring work at all. It is knowing where they stand.
Each site receives a short written report after every visit: what was done, what condition the floor is now in, what is recommended next and roughly when. It is written in plain English rather than trade shorthand, because the person who has to defend the budget is usually not the person who understands sports floors.
Across the estate that aggregates into a single position statement. How many floors are in good order, how many need work in the next twelve months, what the likely spend is, and which buildings carry risk. That is a document that can go in front of a board, a trust finance committee or a local authority without translation.
It also creates a record over time, so you can see whether a floor is deteriorating or holding steady, and make the repair or replace decision on evidence rather than on the last complaint received.
Two or more is usually enough to see a saving, and the benefit grows with scale. Shared mobilisation, one survey trip and a single specification all reduce cost compared with pricing each hall separately.
Yes. We provide method statements, risk assessments and insurance documentation as standard, work to CDM where applicable, and are used to the requirements of school, trust and local authority procurement teams.
Yes. We do not subcontract, so the crew and the standard are consistent from the first site to the last. It is the main reason estate clients stay with us.
We can. The survey report ranks work by urgency so you can phase it across budget cycles, and we will tell you honestly what genuinely cannot wait and what can.
Anything from around five sites upwards, though we work with trusts and operators holding fifty or more. Below five, individually quoted work is usually simpler for everyone.
Yes, and it is normally where we start. Each floor is surveyed, photographed and recorded, and you receive a single document showing what you own, its condition and a priority order.
Yes. We are used to formal procurement and provide the full documentation set including insurances, method statements, quality procedures, safeguarding arrangements and references from comparable estates.
Yes. Rate based arrangements suit estates where the volume is known but individual jobs are not yet defined, and they remove the need to run a separate exercise for every hall.
Deep cleaning, screen and recoat visits, minor repairs, remarking where needed, and an annual written condition inspection per site that updates the estate record and flags what is coming.
Tell us how many sites you are responsible for and we will arrange a whole-estate survey and a single packaged quotation. Call 01823 674562.