Building Schools For The Future

Within the next 10-15 years the Government plans for almost every secondary school in England to be rebuilt or renewed.

The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme aims to eliminate buildings with leaky flat roofs, poorly heated classrooms and portakabins in the play ground and provide secondary pupils with 21st century facilities.

By 2011 every local authority in England will, at the very least, have received funding to cover the cost of rebuilding or renewing its worst school. Public finance initiatives or conventional design and build will fund the construction work.

Responsibility for this ambitious building programme (including the delivery of Academies) has been handed to Partnerships for Schools (PfS) who are funded by the Department for Children Schools and Families.

PfS’ goals include obtaining greater value for money and effective implementation.
This should be achieved through creating partnerships with local authorities and entering into national framework agreements with contractors and consultants. Under the framework the panel members will commit to achieving efficiencies through the delivery of high quality sustainable buildings and by providing value for money.

The use of national frameworks does, of course, limit the opportunities for using locally based contractors and designers so any involvement for them will be as sub-contractors. This can be frustrating as local knowledge and presence is often very important in achieving cost savings.

At a more nuts and bolts level using standard documents for all aspects of BSF projects should avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ on each project and therefore save money. These standard documents range from procurement to the contract documents that under pin the long term partnership and delivery of the principal types of contract.

To encourage the use of standard documents any changes to them must be sent to PfS before they are signed. Only amendments necessary to the successful implementation of the project will be approved. In our own experience at Foot Anstey the parties and their lawyers still find it difficult to resist the temptation to make changes and PfS is also constantly updating the documents.

Renewing our schools will be expensive. In the first year alone £2.2 billion was committed to the BSF programme. When this ambitious programme was launched our economy was stronger than it is today so it remains to be seen whether or not it stays on track. 

For more information or advice, contact Richard Sutton

Published 03/04/2008. The author of this article is Richard Sutton