Education

Throughout the BSF programme and since, Van Elle have worked on many projects for the education sector. These have varied in size greatly and have often needed to be worked around school terms so as not to disrupt classes and teaching, therefore, the programme for each specialist, in most cases, is extremely tight and must be adhered to. This requires a great deal of planning and good relationships with suppliers to ensure they also realise the importance of on-time deliveries.

Most schools, colleges and universities like to profile their developments and spend on facilities to support the teaching of their students so both they and main contractor's alike have to have faith that their sub-contractors will carry out their work in a professional manner, be sympathetic to specific requirements of working in such an environment and will overcome any unforeseen ground conditions/obstructions quickly and efficiently so as not to impact the programme and other trades. It is for these reasons that Van Elle has grown over the past 27 years to be the largest independent ground engineering contractor in the UK, the '2011 Specialist Ground Engineering Contractor of the Year' and highly commended at the 2011 ICE Merit Awards. It has also gained us a reputation envied by many of our competitors and combined with our investment in innovative technologies and bespoke rigs improving reliability on site, has helped us to outperform every other top 10 piling company.

We regularly work small, local companies as well as for many of the UK's largest and best known principal contractors on education projects and due to the successful and reliable completion of such schemes, the amount of repeat business we secure is extremely high.

Usually extremely busy and high-interest projects, health and safety is as important to us, and our clients, as on all other sites and requires special attention to making sites secure; something we take very seriously helping the principal contractors to maintain a zero incident record and students, teaching staff and site teams alike, safe. In the last couple of years, we have launched our 'Think Safety, Act Safely' campaign which has helped us to increase the number of near miss reports by more than 2400% preventing accidents before they happen and recently gaining us a 'Gold Award' from Bam Construction on a site in Newcastle. For more information on our approach to safety, please view our 'Health and Safety' page.

Services offered within the Van Elle Group include piling, restricted access piling, drilling and grouting, ground investigation, slope stabilisation techniques and Smartfoot® precast modular foundations so on schemes where multiple ground engineering technicques are required, our clients have a single point of contact ensuring efficient communication and scheduling.

Our in-house design team have extensive experience of producing quality solutions to, what are often, challenging schemes as well as the other required elements associated with rail projects including planning, attending multiple meetings with clients and engineers and producing the various paperwork ensuring a fluid and hassle-free experience from start to finish.

For information on past projects, please take a look at our rail related case studies or to discuss a specific project in more detail, contact Mark Williams, Group Business Development Manager, on 01773 580580 or at mark.williams@van-elle.co.uk.

Van Elle Piling Rig working at Lincoln Minster School

Site Investigation at Oxford University