Keeping a Kirkby Specialist College Warm, Safe and Open.
Updated: Oct 8
Ofsted rated Activate outstanding in 2026, the first time the Kirkby college has reached the top grade. Activate Community and Education Services, to give the charity its full name, teaches young adults with learning difficulties and disabilities from the Bracknell Centre on Bracknell Avenue. We look after the heating, gas and plumbing in that building, and with our own unit on Knowsley Industrial Park it is a client in our own borough.
Jane Young leads Activate, and she recorded a short video testimonial for us. She says it better than we could, so it sits here before anything else we have to say.
Who Activate are
Activate is a registered charity, number 1123336, founded in 2005. It runs personalised educational and vocational programmes for 19 to 24 year olds with learning difficulties and disabilities. FE Week reported that the college teaches 62 learners, three days a week, and that inspectors praised its careers guidance and its governors.
An earlier version of this page described Activate as an employability charity for people out of work long term. That was wrong. We owe Activate an apology for getting the basics of their work mixed up on our own website, in a post meant to thank them.
What a specialist college needs from its heating engineer
Start with the law. Regulation 35 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 puts a duty on every employer to keep gas appliances, installation pipework and flues at their workplace in a safe condition. It does not set a fixed inspection interval for a college the way the landlord rules do for a rented home. A yearly inspection with a written record is what a school gas safety certificate gives you, and it is what our commercial gas safety certificate covers. The calendar matters as much as the paperwork.
A college teaching three days a week has two weekdays with no learners in the building. That is when planned commercial boiler servicing and anything noisy or invasive should happen, because nobody has to be moved out of a classroom for it.
Routine matters more here than in most buildings we work in. We plan around it. For a learner who relies on a settled day, a strange engineer in a corridor or a room closed off for a leak is a bigger disruption than it would be in an office. So the job is partly technical and partly about turning up when we said we would and leaving the room exactly as we found it.
Then there is the cold. When the heating fails on a teaching day in January, somebody at the college has to decide whether learners can stay. Regular central heating maintenance keeps that decision off the principal's desk for most of the winter, although no engineer can promise a boiler will never fail.
The work we do at the Bracknell Centre
Our work at Activate covers gas safety inspection, servicing and repair of the heating system, and plumbing repairs when something leaks. When a boiler breaks down during the teaching week, the call comes to our office and an engineer goes out from Knowsley Industrial Park. The same goes for the smaller jobs, from a dripping tap in a toilet block to general plumbing that a caretaker should not be attempting.
Supporting the charity as well as the building
Alongside the maintenance work, we have supported Activate's fundraising. It sits with the other local causes we have helped over the years, from Northwood Chapel to the Carla Lane Animal Rescue.
One line in the FE Week coverage stood out to us. Activate trains and develops its own staff because the specialist skills it needs are hard to recruit, locally or nationally. We recognise the problem. Qualified gas engineers are hard to find as well, and the most reliable way we have found to get one is to train them ourselves, as we did with an apprentice who stayed with us all the way to becoming a fully qualified gas engineer.
Other education and community buildings we look after
Activate is one of several education and community clients. At Tree Tops Nursery we installed a commercial boiler during a heating emergency, and on the Wirral we installed a new boiler for an autism centre. The biggest job of this kind was a full heating replacement for the League of Welldoers on Limekiln Lane. We wrote it up in three parts, starting with the planning and survey and followed by the installation itself.
If you run a college, school or charity building
The engineers who already look after Activate can survey your building too. We are Gas Safe registered, number 583586, and our commercial gas engineers work across Liverpool, Knowsley and the areas we cover throughout the North West. Read what other customers say on our testimonials page, find out more about us, or get in touch for a survey.
Call 0151 739 8945 or email info@ddwilson.com.
Frequently asked questions
Is a school gas safety certificate a legal requirement?
The law requires an employer to keep gas appliances, pipework and flues in a safe condition under regulation 35 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. It sets no fixed interval for a school or college. An annual inspection by a Gas Safe registered engineer, with a written record, is the clearest way to show the duty is met.
When should heating work be done in a school or college?
Outside teaching time where possible. Activate teaches three days a week, so planned servicing and larger repairs fit into the two weekdays without learners in the building.
Who is Activate CES?
Activate Community and Education Services is a Kirkby charity and independent specialist college for young adults aged 19 to 24 with learning difficulties and disabilities. It is based at the Bracknell Centre, Bracknell Avenue, and was rated outstanding by Ofsted in 2026.
