Estates
Space utilisation surveys
Frequency, occupancy, and the figure nobody likes. A survey almost always produces the same result, and it is almost never the one the institution expected: the rooms are busy and the seats are empty.
Three numbers, and only one of them is quoted
British higher education measures teaching space with two rates and their product. Frequency is how often a room is in use compared with the hours it is available. Occupancy is how full it is when it is in use, against its capacity. Utilisation is the two multiplied together.
American institutions measure the same thing and call the halves time utilization and seat or station utilization. The benchmarking bodies differ too: AUDE in Britain, TEFMA across Australia and New Zealand.
The figure that gets quoted in a committee paper is the product, and it is the least useful of the three on its own. A 30% utilisation figure could be a room used all day at a third full, or a room used a third of the day and packed. Those are opposite problems with opposite answers.
The same two problems, told apart
| Frequency | Occupancy | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | Low | The rooms are booked constantly and half empty. | Wrong room sizes, or groups not being matched to capacity. A scheduling problem, not a building problem. |
| Low | High | Rooms are full when used, and idle much of the week. | Teaching is concentrated into the middle of the day and the middle of the week. A policy problem. |
| Low | Low | Both. | Usually a room that is departmentally controlled and effectively invisible to the central timetable. |
| High | High | Genuinely constrained. | The only case in which a new building is the honest answer. |
Why the survey is usually unnecessary
The traditional method is a space audit: people walking the building with a clipboard for a fortnight, counting heads. It is expensive, it samples two weeks of a thirty-week year, and it measures what happened rather than what was planned.
An institution that timetables centrally already holds the frequency half exactly, for every room, for the whole year, because the timetable IS the record of when rooms are in use. The occupancy half needs expected group sizes, which the same system holds. The survey then becomes a check on the data rather than the source of it.
The honest caveat: planned occupancy is not attendance. If the question is how many students actually came, that is a different measurement — see attendance monitoring.
The question behind the question
Utilisation figures are rarely requested out of curiosity. They are requested because somebody has proposed a building, or because somebody is about to take one away. In that context the useful output is not a percentage but a picture of the week: which hours are saturated, which are empty, and what would have to move for the estate to absorb a change.
That is a timetabling question, and it is answerable before the decision rather than after it.
Where this lives in Wise Timetable
Timetable reports produce space and room utilisation by room, building, campus and time of day, with frequency and occupancy separated, exportable to Excel and PDF for committee papers. What the numbers usually reveal is covered in improving room utilisation, and the reports senior management asks for in timetable reports for university management.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.