Direct Audits Website Guidance for Schools

Direct Audits is the name of the website used to store the Essex school building condition data collected during their surveys between November 2013 and March 2014. The data will be available through this website for at least five years when the next survey is due. School staff members are able to view the data for their school via this website.

It is intended that schools use this website to help them identify and prioritise maintenance work that has been assigned as a school responsibility. It is also useful for school staff to be aware of work that ECC has identified as a Local Authority responsibility.

Each school has been given a single set of login details. Ideally knowledge of these login details will be constrained to the Head, the Bursar, the Site Manager and maybe some key office staff. Other people connected to the school such as governors will be keen to see the data but the website has a function to create PDF reports of the data which we recommend are emailed to interested parties.

So, how do you log into and use the website?

The website address is: www.directaudits.com so click on the link to the left or copy and paste it into a web browser such as internet explorer. You will see the login screen shown below.

Client Password = ecc, Username and Password are individual to you. If you have forgotten yours, the MITIE helpdesk can remind you of your username and/or reset your password. Both Username and Password are case sensitive. Then press the blue LOG IN button. Once you have logged in you will see the screen below.

Feel free to look around this webpage and see what all the different buttons do. Perhaps the most useful button on this webpage is the Query Reports button / Reports button (they do the same thing).

They both take you to the same useful area of the website:

This webpage allows you to use a series of drop down menus to ask questions of the school condition database . Schools can only be able to query their own data. For example, you could ask the question: Show me all the highest priority (priority 1) mechanical engineering issues that are the responsibility of the LA :

The way you do this is to: 1. Click on Element to display the options for building elements and select "Mechanical Engineering" 1. Click on[Effect on User] and select "1" (effect on user drives the priority band) 2. Click on [Responsibility] and Select "LA" 3. Press the [Run Report] button

All of the priority 1 mechanical engineering items at your school for which LA has maintenance responsibility will be listed. Scroll down to look at them and click on the photos to view them more clearly.

An example of one of the list items is shown below:

The blue MANAGE button on the right allows you to inspect each item more closely and, if the item is assigned to the school, even update it.

If you press on the Options Show/Hide bar:

You will be given the option to export your query results into Excel where you can play about with the data more easily.

A particularly useful criterion is [Excl Zero Cost] which has the effect of only showing you the maintenance items that have a monetary cost assigned to them. This lets you immediately identify the most important maintenance issues.

To print a PDF report of your school, press the report button, then press Search then press Component Condition then press View.

If you want to return to the front page of the website from any area of the website, just press the Site button:

From the front page you can also watch some instructional videos about the website by pressing the help button: I encourage you to log on, have a play with the user interface and try some report querying. I think you will find it is quite intuitive and you will soon get used to it.

If you want some advice, email [email protected] in the ECC Infrastructure delivery Team who will be glad to help.

David Gatheral ECC Infrastructure Delivery 01245 436901 28/03/2014