1 Building educational objectives

1. The Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) is intended to renew all 3,500 English secondary schools, by rebuilding half of them, structurally remodelling 35%, refurbishing 15% and providing all of them with new information communication technology equipment, at an estimated capital cost of £52-£55 billion.2

2. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (the Department) wants BSF to improve educational attainment and the life chances available to children by providing educational, recreational and social environments that support modern teaching and learning methods. It wants the buildings to be used by local communities and to respond to developing needs. And it wants BSF to support local reorganisation of secondary schools to reflect demographic needs and a greater diversity of provision.3

3. The Department says that it will judge the success of projects by their impact on these educational outcomes. In response to the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, it has developed a dashboard of indicators that includes educational outcomes in order to assess the performance of Partnerships for Schools, the incorporated non-departmental public body established in 2003 to manage the national delivery of programme.4 It has also commissioned annual external evaluations of the programme's effect on education.5 It has not, however, published a set of measurable national objectives that capture the full range of the Department's intentions for the programme, nor defined how providing new buildings will aid improvements to education.

4. The Department was over-optimistic in its planning of the programme.6 In 2003, the Department said that that it wanted to deliver the BSF programme over 10 to 15 years (2005-2015 or 2005-2020). It now plans to have all schools underway by 2020, meaning the programme will be delivered over 18 years (2005-2023).7 It also said that the first 200 schools could be built by December 2008. Instead, the first 200 will now be built by September 2010.8

5. The Department's compressed timetable for launching the programme and using its initial allocation of funding was not realistic. In 2003, it said that funding would start in 2005-06, even though:

• this estimate allowed no time to launch Partnerships for Schools;

• it required local plans for each school estate to be developed and approved as quickly as the Treasury was then taking just to approve plans for single PFI deals, and

• it required all the procurement to be as quick as the quickest ever school PFI deal.9

6. Although the Department was advised on its timetable and assumptions by both Partnerships UK and Partnerships for Schools, they did not test the assumptions against similar projects and programmes.10 Had the Department and its advisors done so, they would have realised that the plans were unachievable. They knew, for example, that 18 months was the quickest anyone had managed to procure a PFI school, but stated that BSF pilots would be that quick and the next wave of projects would be quicker, despite Local Education Partnerships being a new model, and more complicated to procure.11

7. The Department remains confident that its poor planning has not adversely affected the quality of the schools being delivered or its ability to include all schools by 2023.12 But poor planning has heightened expectations and created disappointment. This has diminished the effectiveness of BSF by reducing the confidence of local authorities, contractors, and schools in the programme.13

8. Poor planning also led to an inappropriate allocation of resources. In 2006-07, the Department did not use £717 million of its capital grant budget, due to delays in the programme, and this money could have been usefully deployed elsewhere.14 The Department also moved resources away from BSF to use them for less strategic programmes.15

9. Such poor planning is not unique to BSF. This Committee has seen many programmes over the years where poor planning and over-optimistic assumptions have led to cost and time overruns, including the Olympics, major defence procurement projects, the Department for Health's National Programme for IT, and the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line.16 In all these programmes, over-optimism at the start led to eventual cost or time overruns, leading to damage to the reputation of the programme and a reduction in public goodwill towards it.

10. Although the Department and Partnerships for Schools have committed themselves to increasing the pace of the programme, current commitments are not enough to deliver all schools by 2023. Partnerships for Schools has promised to increase the pace of delivery to 200 schools a year from 2011 onwards, but delivery would need to increase to 250 schools a year on average from 2011 onwards to deliver all 3,500 by 2023.17

11. Partnerships for Schools has also promised that the number of schools in construction will increase to 300 in the summer of 2010. This depends on all the schools currently in procurement finishing on schedule.18 To deliver all 3,500 schools by 2023, however, Partnerships for Schools will need to increase further the number of schools in construction and procurement to 800 at a time by December 2011, meaning that at least 145 schools that have not yet started their planning will need to be in procurement.19

12. Delivering all schools by 2023 requires the doubling of the number of schools in procurement and construction at any one time over the next three years, an additional eight or nine Local Authorities to start BSF each year for the next eight years and spending an additional £0.9 billion to £1.2 billion annually from 2011 onwards.20 We have recently heard how the Learning and Skills Council failed to manage an acceleration in the programme of renewing Further Education Colleges, leading to it being unable to afford the number of projects in the pipeline of procurement and construction.21 The Department and Partnerships for Schools have exercised better control over the overall scope, flow and cost of BSF, but they are facing a similar acceleration in the number of projects they support, as well as a large funding gap.22

13. For BSF to improve the quality of education, local authorities and schools will need to do more than provide new buildings.23 The Academies programme aims to improve educational attainment in deprived areas by replacing poorly performing schools with new independent schools. The Department provides considerable support for the change management and start-up of each Academy.24 In BSF, the Department requires local authorities to set out strategic plans for how they will achieve improvements in education as part of the BSF approval process for the capital funding. Local authorities and schools are jointly responsible for planning, funding and delivering educational changes, including changes to the curriculum, teaching methods, and how the new facilities will be used.25

14. The Department provides training and support to schools and local authorities at the early planning stage, through the National College of School Leadership. School leaders, however, manage the transition and early operational stages without central support and often feel left to manage alone. There is little consistency in the educational targets chosen by local authorities, and some schools have been late to plan for, and implement, changes, including training and employment arrangements for staff to be transferred to the contractors.26

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2 Q1

3 Qq 95-96; C&AG's Report, paras 1-2

4 Q11

5 Qq 42-45

6 Qq 15-20

7 Q14

8 C&AG's Report, para 2.5

9 C&AG's Report, paras 2.6, 3.2

10 Qq 15-16

11 Q 15; C&AG's Report, paras 2.6, 2.12

12 Qq 1-2, 16