14 Bristol was the first Local Authority to establish a LEP. The overall programme appears to be going well and Bristol continues to be ahead of other Local Authorities.
15 In September 2007, it became the first Local Authority to open a new BSF school, Bristol Brunel Academy. It was on time and budget. Its proportion of students achieving five or more A* to Cs including Maths and English at GCSE grades increased from 19 to 34 per cent in its first year. It recently won the Private Finance Design Award.
16 Bristol believes that some of the anticipated benefits of a LEP are starting to be felt: standardisation, lower costs of procurement and better design. However, it has yet to assess these benefits accurately. It is drawing in additional Local Authority work, including a primary school, three Academies and children's centres.
17 But issues arose during the procurement of the first few schools that could have been avoided:
■ Bristol was the only case study at the time of our visits to have any operational experience of open schools in the BSF programme. Speedwell Technology College became Bristol Brunel Academy during its building's reconstruction. The new leadership team was not involved in the design of the new building as they were appointed after the contract was agreed. They have spent additional money adapting the new building to their requirements at further cost, but some aspects are not working well for their new educational strategy. For example, the Academy needed more desktop PCs than originally envisaged leading to crowded ICT suites that are too small for the teacher to move between desks to help individual students.
■ The Local Authority and the ICT contractor are in disagreement over a number of implementation issues, including whether the service has been fully implemented. PfS sponsored an independent review to help broker agreement on what went wrong and how it could be put right. One of the main issues that arose out of this was that Bristol had retained responsibility for implementing the contractors' systems, including all training and roll-out. This is now included as a contractor's duty in the standard ICT contract specification.
■ Schools told us that they found it difficult to distinguish the role and responsibilities of the LEP from the supply chain. Relations between the consortia contractors were strained as they were competing against each other in other national BSF projects. The LEP was not helping to mediate or integrate their work as intended.