Summary
This Report
‘Sustainable
Schools: Are we Building Schools for the Future?’ (HC 140-I) examines the
Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.
Under the
Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme the Government is seeking to
rebuild or refurbish all secondary schools in England over a 15-year period at
a cost of £45 billion, with local authorities participating in a series of 15
'waves'. (See more on
‘Schools
for the Future: Design of Sustainable Schools’ and
‘Schools
for the Future: Designing School Grounds’.)
The Committee's Report
examines the progress being made on the programme and makes recommendations
about the ways in which the process might be improved, focusing on three key
areas:
- The planning and procurement process
- Whether the
objective of educational transformation is really at the heart of the
process
- Whether the issue of sustainability has been adequately
defined and has a sufficiently high profile.
The Report
acknowledges that this is an immensely ambitious programme, given its aim is
not only to improve school buildings and provide investment in ICT facilities
but also to transform the educational experience of pupils and to embed
sustainability. Not since the huge Victorian and post-war building waves has
there been investment in the school capital stock on this scale, and there is
no project like it anywhere else in the world. Delays in the project against
its original timetable are of less significant risk to its success than
inadequate early planning at a local level. It is vital that local authorities
who have encountered delays are able to develop plans that are robust and
achievable, and that the lessons are learned from the experiences of earlier
'waves' of the programme in order to avoid repetition of the same delays and
difficulties.
The Committee accepts that it is the viability of a
project as it is developed that is the main risk factor in a BSF project, but
notes that there are risks associated with Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as
a funding method. It calls on the Government to clarify its assessment of the
sustainability of the levels of revenue commitments across local authorities in
general and the lessons that it has learned from those PFI-funded schools which
have been forced to close.
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