The HESMG grading tool was created solely by members of the Higher Education Space Management Group back in 2017, but it remains as relevant now as when it was first produced as a visually engaging tool to display utilisation rates for general purpose learning spaces. The development of the tool was led by our own Dave Beavis, who is now Escentral’s Head of Space Management.
It is used to 'grade' the surveyed utilisation of general purpose learning spaces (GPLS). It moves away from using percentage figures, which are awkward to explain, and instead favours an intuitive visual grading.
HE institutions are completely free to use the tool as part of their learning space analysis. We, at Escentral, will be offering the tool as an optional analysis on our LS surveys, which we carry out for our partners, at no additional cost.
It's been in frequent use by many institutions since it first came out, and has had many notable impacts. It really helps to focus the challenges in terms of LS utilisation, identifying opportunities, insight, and more, and is a very useful tool in terms of persuading stakeholders to improve utilisation and the use of the LS estate.
Kingston University began using the Utilisation Grading Tool shortly after its launch in 2017 and it had an immediate impact. Utilisation data is often comprehensive and can be overwhelming for anyone not closely associated with space management or timetabling. The tool provides a dashboard style visualisation in an easy to interpret format that is ideal for presenting the data to a wider audience, which proved invaluable in focusing on the problem rather than the data.
Our first use of the tool helped us to make some quick wins in areas where previously issues had not been apparent. The tool is now used as the default method of reporting on utilisation across the University. More recently, the visualisation has assisted in making some quick reactive decisions on closure of space and relocation of teaching.
Our first use of the tool helped us to make some quick wins in areas where previously issues had not been apparent. The tool is now used as the default method of reporting on utilisation across the University. More recently, the visualisation has assisted in making some quick reactive decisions on closure of space and relocation of teaching.
Earl Blake
Find out more about using the tool in this instructional video
Get in touch if you have any further questions!
Reach out to us through the Contact page or via [email protected]
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