The caretaker died, and we killed him

The caretaker died, and we killed him

No, this is not an argument against caretakers.

It is an argument against nostalgia and the older world as we move into the new.

My title will annoy some people, and perhaps it should. Because most of us can picture him immediately: the school caretaker with the ring of keys, the moral and practical wisdom, the unofficial school authority, the memory of every leak, draught, jammed door and temperamental boiler. He knew the site better than anyone. He kept the place going. He was often the difference between chaos and continuity.

And yet (for a change../s) I want to suggest something uncomfortable.

The caretaker did not ‘die’ or disappear because we stopped caring about schools.

He disappeared because the job became too important to be carried by one person’s memory, ingenuity and goodwill. That is what I mean by saying “the caretaker died, and we killed him”.

Top marks for anyone that realises that is a deliberate echo of Nietzsche’s (probably) most famous line, so often misunderstood as a chest-thumping statement about atheism. It was not really that. It was actually a diagnosis: an old organising idea had lost its force, but people were still living as though it had not. The real question wasn’t whether “God” had died. The real question was whether we understood the consequences.. 

That is where we are with the caretaker. 

We still talk as if the old model of school stewardship is enough: a decent, practical, committed individual keeping a school running through part-vigilance, improvisation and buckets of personal pride. But the conditions have changed. The estate has changed. The expectations have changed. The language, changed. And the moral burden of getting it wrong has changed.

Today, an education estate is expected to be; safe, suitable, sustainable and sufficiently sized. That sounds tidy enough as DfE policy language, but look at what it really means in reality, in daily practice.

To me, some 20 years in, it means buildings and spaces must be structurally safe and meet health and safety requirements. It means they must support inclusion SEMH and SEND. It means they must be consistently resilient to overheating, flooding and cyber risk. It means they must carry reliable digital infrastructure, the newest utility of our information age. It means they must adapt to regional demographic change, support community use, and make better use of public money over the long term. 

This is not a bigger version of the old caretaker job. It is an entirely different moral dimension. 

For far too long, the caretaker sector has relied on bodging and fixing entropic, deteriorating buildings and intervening only when things become serious enough to be impossible to hide or ignore. 

The new Education Estates strategy is unusually overt about this. It says plainly that the system must break the cycle of “patching and mending deteriorating buildings” and stop only addressing those in the very worst condition; it is “not sustainable to rely on rebuilding alone” Bingo.

That sentence should perhaps land a bit harder than it does with some of us, but especially those in old schools, municipal buildings and even now, big corporations - the costs of replacement, finally became too high for us to be frivolous or wasteful.

Because “patch-and-mend” sounds prudent, resourceful, even virtuous. It sounds like making do. It sounds like proper old school stewardship.

But often it is only stewardship in the day to day, emotional sense, reliant on a bigger drama rearing up elsewhere in the school to overshadow the latest mess made. Part of the psychological mechanism of the caretaker is the unconscious desire to be the “hero of the hour”. Many people looking in, fail to recognise the hero saving the classroom by stopping the leak, is actually the man whose negligence often led to the leak in the first place. 

This level of reactive stewardship is not a sustainable strategy. 

It is what institutions do when they have normalised operating below the level that children, staff and communities should reasonably expect. It is symptomatic of what happens when knowledge sits in heads rather than systems, when risk is managed through life experience and habit rather than evidence, and when the estate is held together by personal heroics rather than organisational capability.

And that is the deeper point.

The old caretaker figure was admirable precisely because the system asked him to absorb fragility on everyone else’s behalf.

He knew which roof would need watching after heavy rain. He knew which heating run needed coaxing each October. He knew which contractor would actually bother turning up and at least smoke out of view. He knew what to do when a room was technically usable but, in truth, no longer good enough. He made the inadequate seem manageable.

Whilst we reminisce and remember the competence and devotion.

We forget the structural indictment hidden inside them.

Now, the more serious we become about educational outcomes, safety, public value and inclusion, the less acceptable that model becomes. As the Statutes and Acts are taken more seriously, the Executive response rises, so on, it drips down, expectations rise. 

After all, the education estate is not just a backdrop to teaching and learning. The Education Estates strategy describes it as a “platform for opportunity, learning and community” and links poor estate conditions with lower attainment, while also noting the positive impact that the physical environment can have for pupils with SEND. 

If indeed buildings affect attainment, wellbeing, inclusion and belonging, then estates management is no longer peripheral work. It is finally being seen as educational work.

And once you accept that, the rest follows on. 

You cannot run an educational mission on undocumented local memory alone.

You cannot manage coming climate resilience with a dirty mop and a gut feeling.

You can’t deliver inclusion through £50 bodges and workarounds.

You cannot protect public investment value by waiting for failure and paying premium prices to vulture contractors. 

You cannot claim to be strategic while depending on informal, heroic, reactive practices.

That is why the strategy places such emphasis on proactive management, long-term strategic maintenance, renewal, data and digital capability, asset management plans and clearer standards for named Responsible Bodies.

Some will hear that and say: 

“there you are, then. We have replaced people with systems”

I think the opposite is true and I have good arguments for it, too.

We have finally started building systems worthy of the people who were previously carrying too much on their own, and that isn’t bureaucracy for its own sake. It is moral seriousness.

It is a statement; asserting that a child’s access to a safe and suitable environment should not depend on whether one exceptionally capable individual happens to know the quirks of a complex site. 

It is stating that estate knowledge should survive retirement, illness and turnover. It is saying that risk should be visible before it becomes urgent or injures. It is saying that maintenance should be planned across the lifetime of a building, not improvised at the point of failure. It is saying that schools and colleges deserve stewardship that is institutional, not just personal.

In that sense, we did indeed “kill the caretaker”.

We killed the myth of the lone fixer willing to kill himself for some praise.

We killed the romance of heroic reactive competence.

We killed the flattering idea that ‘making do’ is the same as doing right.

And we killed it because our standards rose.

We want estates that are safer. More inclusive. More resilient. More intelligent in the way they use data. More capable of supporting community life. More strategic in the way they handle condition, risk and renewal and retain and share value.

The strategy’s whole direction is toward earlier intervention, better information, stronger standards, and more deliberate long-term planning.

So no, this is not an obituary for care or those who took it. 

It is an argument for its maturity. Our maturity. 

The successor to the old caretaker is not ‘no one’. It is not a system or spreadsheet. It isn’t the flash Merc’ driving consultant’s slide deck.

It is a more adult form of stewardship: site teams, estates professionals, leaders, trusts, local authorities and Responsible Bodies working within a human system that remembers, plans, prioritises, records, anticipates and renews. The tools have changed as the hands the wield them. 

That may feel less romantic than the man with the keys and greasy spanner.

But it is more honest.

And, more importantly, it is more just.

Because fundamentally, we all agree that children should no longer have to learn in buildings held together by affection and improvisation alone.

They deserve buildings held together by care that has become systematic but with the intelligence and heart of the truth. And the truth is, the likeable, fast response guy that saves us from the leak he contributed to, is dead.

The unpopular guy with the facts and evidence will bring longevity, value and safety.