Property Maintenance Grant for school maintenance work

• Paying for maintenance work
• Calculating funding for maintenance work
• Using the correct funding source for maintenance work

Paying for maintenance work

We provide the Property Maintenance Grant (PMG) for you to pay for maintenance work. This grant is part of your school’s operational funding.

You must include your PMG funding in your 10 Year Property Plan (10YPP) . The maintenance schedule must cover:

• general maintenance and painting for school buildings
• ground maintenance
• swimming pool maintenance.

Maintenance by your caretaker

Your caretaker may do a lot of your maintenance work. You pay their wages from your operational funding.

Do not include work that will be done by your caretaker in your 10YPP or use PMG to pay the caretaker's salary.

Calculating funding for maintenance work

We calculate your PMG based on:

• gross area (the internal areas of a building including areas such as corridors, toilets, stairwells, etc) of Ministry-owned or integrated land and buildings
• square metres of painted surfaces
• square metres of walls, floors and roofs
• cubic capacity of the swimming pool
• the ‘corrosion factor’ for schools in areas where buildings are subject to very high corrosion from extreme weather and salt spray (it provides a top-up for these schools to carry out the more frequent maintenance needed)
• the ‘isolation factor’, which is linked to the isolation index used in operational funding (it is an adjustment for schools in isolated areas that have extra costs due to their remoteness).

The PMG is calculated for your land up to a maximum size:

• primary – 2.5 hectares
• intermediate – 4 hectares
• secondary – 8 hectares
• composite – 6 hectares.

Note: Your PMG is not affected by other issues, such as where your students come from.

Correct information needed to calculate your funding

We record all this information in our Property Management Information System (PMIS) . Keeping this information up to date is important for PMG calculations. Contact your Ministry office if you:

• think your school’s information is incomplete
• filled out an asset update form for a new building incorrectly.

If you received insufficient funding because of incorrect information, talk to your property advisor. You may be entitled to a reimbursement of up to a maximum of 3 years’ worth of funding. Back payments will be paid out along with your next operational funding grant.

Buildings qualifying for PMG funding

Only Ministry-funded buildings and facilities qualify for PMG funding. For instance:

• where the community owns property, the community group must pay for its maintenance, and the lease agreement should cover this arrangement. For more information, see Leasing or hiring school land and buildings to third parties
  
• where you have paid for property with board funding, such as with money raised by fundraising, you must use board funding to pay for its maintenance.

Property ownership is recorded in the PMIS.

Grant Advice Notices

Each year we send you 2 Grant Advice Notices.

1. Indicative.
2. Confirmed.

These contain the details of your PMG for the year. The funding is paid directly to your school’s bank account in 4 quarterly instalments, along with your operational funding.

Urgent health and safety work

You do not get additional PMG funding for unplanned, urgent health and safety work, such as repairing a broken pavement that could be a trip hazard. Do this work immediately using your PMG.

Non-urgent health and safety maintenance work should be prioritised in your 10YPP. Good maintenance will help prevent the need for urgent work.

Using the correct funding source for maintenance work

For budgeting purposes, you need to understand the difference between capital and maintenance work. Assess the amount of change required to help you decide whether a task is capital or maintenance work. For example, if:

• a section of sewerage pipe needs replacing, this is maintenance, but
• if all or most of the pipe needs replacing (effectively requiring a new system), this is capital replacement.

See:  Understanding the difference between capital and maintenance costs .

Maintenance funding is not for other operating expenses

Do not use your PMG to pay for your school’s operating expenses such as:

• repairing damage caused by vandalism
• maintenance of furniture and equipment
• heat, light and water
• contents insurance
• local council rates
• day-to-day expenses such as cleaning, rubbish disposal, consumables (paper, pens etc), pool chemicals, caretaker’s wages, grass cutting, pest control and water charges.

Pay for these other expenses from other parts of your operational funding. See Operational funding componentsProperty maintenance grant .