1. BSF is an important part of the Department's efforts to improve educational attainment and the life chances of children, but the Department has not explained what success looks like. The Department should define the full benefits it wants BSF to achieve and develop a set of measurable indicators against which it can monitor the success of the programme and assess options.
2. The Department's poor planning and persistent over-optimism has led to widespread disappointment with the programme's progress and reduced confidence in its approach and ability to include all schools by 2023. Such over-optimism is systemic across the Civil Service's planning of major projects and programmes. The Department should review the reasons why it was over-optimistic and, with the help of the Cabinet Office and the Office for Government Commerce, disseminate lessons across Whitehall.
3. The Department and Partnerships for Schools appears complacent about the challenge of renewing all secondary schools by 2023. Doing so requires:
• the doubling of the number of schools in procurement and construction;
• 8 or 9 Local Authorities to start BSF a year, and
• the construction of 250 schools a year from 2011 onwards.
Current promises to increase the pace of the programme are not sufficient to meet this. The Department and Partnerships for Schools should set out a detailed plan of how it intends to increase the pace of delivery and finish the programme on time.
4. The Department and Partnerships for Schools has wasted public money by relying on consultants to make up for shortfalls in its own skills and resources. The Department should avoid making false economies in central administration, whilst Partnerships for Schools should target its resources where they can have the most effect. Both bodies should plan their required level of skills and resources to avoid costly reliance on consultants for core roles.
5. The value for money of using Local Education Partnerships (LEPs) has still to be proved. LEPs offer the potential to achieve procurement and partnering efficiencies, but only if they can be made to work in practice and if the actual savings over their lifetime outweigh the high upfront costs of procurement. Partnerships for Schools should establish systems to measure the full costs and benefits of each LEP and provide guidance to local authorities, their contractors and schools on how to achieve the benefits.
6. Schools and local authorities are provided with little support to achieve the educational aims of BSF. The Department and Partnerships for Schools should provide guidance on how to introduce structured, standardised and systematic benefits realisation processes, focused on achieving the national and local education objectives.
7. The Department plans that most BSF schools will be procured without competitive tendering. Although LEPs have a number of governance and contractual mechanisms to control costs, local authorities will need to rely mostly on cost comparators to assess the value for money of each project.
8. Partnerships for Schools has yet to provide local authorities with enough information to build cost comparators and compare the price of each project. Partnerships for Schools should, as a matter of urgency, produce comprehensive cost comparators covering all costs of new and refurbished schools, including their building, maintenance, information communication technology capital and revenue, procurement, and contract management. Doing so will allow judgements to be made on the value for money of each project and the comparison of procurement routes.
9. The remuneration arrangements for Partnerships UK cost too much and do not help the programme meet its aims. It should not be necessary to develop complex commercial agreements and pay Partnerships UK high investment returns to motivate it to provide the help and support that is central to its mission statement. The Department should pay for support it needs from Partnerships UK through a straightforward fee.
10. The Treasury has recently announced that the Government will provide debt financing of BSF private finance initiative projects where sufficient private debt financing is unavailable and the project has started procurement. For such projects, Partnerships for Schools should help local authorities to assess whether the overall sharing of risks and rewards is still appropriate.