BSF special: the painful upbringing of Building Schools for the Future

The construction industry is swallowing its doubts about the Building Schools for the Future programme. Well, it really doesn’t have much choice: the shaky state of the commercial sector, and the catastrophic state of housebuilding, mean it cannot afford to snub an initiative that will, if all goes to plan, offer it something like £45bn of work.

That said, the relationship got off to a difficult start. The idea of upgrading or replacing all 3,500 secondary schools in England was announced in 2004. Since then, 13 schools have opened before the start of this academic year, and 21 more opened last week. In the meantime, the industry has spent a huge amount on winning, or failing to win, work. The bidders for a typical BSF project can between them spend as much as £15m, and each of the teams stands a better than even chance of losing their money.

The signs are that BSF is about to splutter into life and begin producing the 230 schools a year that are needed if the government to completing the programme by 2020.

Partnerships for Schools (PfS), the organisation charged with delivering the programme, and Tim Byles, its chief executive, have made some changes to address its critics. But will they be enough to to achieve its aim of delivering “transformational” education by 2020?

Slow starter

This ambition has already been called into question after Cabe recently described 80% of designs at an advanced stage as “mediocre”, which hardly inspires confidence.

Then there is the issue of speed. A reason why the programme is so slow is the depth and complexity of BSF. It is not just a case of the odd new building. Rather, the programme is supposed to rethink the way education is done. Those of us in our thirties and forties will recall schools filled with rows of identical classrooms off a spinal corridor, each filled with files of identical desks. The experience of children now will be dominated by the computers and the internet. IT is a key ingredient in BSF schools, each of which is one node in a distributed network with access to the same resources. Another complicating factor is that these schools are not just for the kids but are meant to be accessible to the wider community.

This means a council really needs to define its vision before it puts a notice in the Official Journal. A winning consortium forms a local education partnership (LEP) with the sponsoring council to deliver all the schools in its area. The scope and long-term nature of its relationship means that the council’s plan has to hold good for 30 years or more.

According to Adrian Riddler, a project manager with Capita Symonds who advised Birmingham council on its BSF programme, this is not easy. “It’s all things to all people,” he says. “Some authorities want to fundamentally reconfigure education; to others, transformation means stopping the roof from leaking and putting in a new staff room.” He adds that local authorities need expert advice to transform the general PfS contract documentation into something suitable for their vision. Although this is time consuming, it must be more important to get it right rather than risk leaving a local authority stuck with unsuitable facilities.

Improving its grades

The good news is that there is scope to speed things up. Unnecessary delays are caused by local authorities not being ready for their allocated slot on the BSF programme. The 15-year programme has been organised into 15 waves with councils allocated a slot on the programme according to need. “Part of the reason for the slow delivery is that councils didn’t organise themselves to deliver to the programme,” says David Long, the partner who heads Davis Langdon’s delivery team.

PfS has changed the rules to allow local authorities that are ready to leapfrog those that are not, a move Long thinks will help speed up the process. “It places more onus on the council to get their business plan sorted out, because if they take their time there’s no guarantee of the money.”

Keeping the designs down to two means there’s more capacity in the market, plus there are the cost savings

Andrew Percival, Taylor Woodrow

Another time-saving and cost-cutting move has been to reduce the number of bidders from three to two. Moreover, each bidder has to design two sample schools as part of its bid rather than three or four, as was previously the case. The idea is that subsequent schools procured under a LEP are benchmarked against these initial designs, so that rather than labouring over as many as 12 establishments, bidders have four, which is a big saving. PfS reckons typical bid costs have been cut from £10.4m to £7m.

This has been universally welcomed, as Andrew Percival, Taylor Woodrow’s sector director for healthcare and education, explains. “Keeping it down to two means the council is still getting a good focus on design without spreading itself too thinly in assessing them, and it means there’s more capacity in the market as people aren’t designing schools that don’t get used, plus there are the cost savings associated with that.” Percival points out that ultimately it is the local authorities that end up paying for the bid costs.

What about the criticisms of design quality? Originally, Cabe assessed completed designs, which meant it was difficult to make changes. Now it is involved during the design process, which means problems can be identified earlier. But some architects think the review process is unfair. Cabe uses 10 categories (see pages 52-59) and a school can achieve an excellent standard in nine but get marked down overall if it gets a mediocre in the last one. Caroline Buckingham, the director in charge of education at HLM Architects, says: “It can be very hard to have an impact on certain categories, for example a very religious school may not want much community involvement but you get marked down if the design doesn’t encourage that. A points-based system would be much better.”

Buckingham adds that a lot of the work done by the local authority to define what it wants is repeated by the consortiums bidding for the work. She thinks time and money could be saved by developing a concept design that is then passed on to the bidders.

While it is good that there is so much focus on quality design, the big question is whether this will be maintained for the duration of the LEP. The idea is that subsequent schools will be benchmarked against the sample schools. This is a somewhat subjective process, and a mechanism needs to be found to enforce it. And if budgets get squeezed (the Comprehensive Spending Review only guarantees funding up to 2011) then later schools will suffer. Taylor Woodrow’s Percival remains bullish: “We must make sure we get it right, as the best form of marketing is to make sure we have a successful LEP.”

Now procurement has been improved, more schools should be built, Percival thinks it is a good time for contractors to jump on the BSF bandwagon. “You have to look at where the money is being spent and healthcare is currently very quiet.”

But BSF is no get-rich-quick scheme.

“There aren’t big returns in education,” says John Howard, Bouygues’ senior commercial manager, who is on his third BSF scheme. “But it’s a good solid business to be in.” Both Percival and Howard emphasise that the benefit is a long-term supply of work, and the partnering approach means contractors are ideally placed for other local authority work outside BSF.

They warn that the complexity of BSF and the wide range of skills needed is a serious barrier to entry, but the determined could break in, and if contractors cannot lead a LEP there will be opportunities for them to build schools as subcontractors.

So what is the verdict on BSF? The one hard metric – improved exam results – is difficult to determine, as it takes years for the results to filter through. But PfS has seized on the good results from new schools this year to say the programme has been vindicated. Regardless of this, most of the school estate is in such poor condition that something has to be done. The ambitions of the programme mean this cannot be sorted out cheaply or fast; the good news is that areas ripe for improvement have been tackled by PfS.

The key is to keep improving the procurement and design process. The other issue is to not let the programme go off the boil in the later stages, and given the increasingly shaky state of public finances this is some challenge.