RELATED: Which schools qualify for the education Workplace Charging Scheme?
How the Per School Rule Works
The scheme treats each school as its own institution, not the trust as one body. Separate applications, separate vouchers, separate 40 socket allowances. The only sharing rule is historical: any sockets a school previously claimed under the standard Workplace Charging Scheme count against that school’s 40.
For estates teams this changes the planning conversation. Instead of asking which school gets the budget, the question becomes sequencing: which sites first, and how to standardise the hardware and back office across the estate so every site reports into one dashboard.
How Trusts Sequence a Rollout
The pattern that works: survey the whole estate once, then install in waves through holiday windows. Start with the sites that have the strongest staff demand and the best public revenue potential, use identical hardware everywhere, and let the platform handle per site tariffs and reporting centrally.
Surveying everything upfront costs nothing extra and gives the trust board one paper covering every site, every grant value and a phased budget. It also locks the electrical design so later waves reuse the same specification rather than starting again.
RELATED: How does a school apply for the EV charging grant?
The Practical Snags We Handle
Reference numbers trip people up. Each application needs the individual school’s number, not the trust’s, and the applicant email must match that school’s domain, which sometimes means briefing each business manager rather than running everything from head office. We prepare the pack per school so each submission is a signature, not a project.
Voucher timing is the other one. Vouchers have redemption windows, so applying for ten schools at once means committing to ten installations inside those windows. Waves solve it.
