Priority schools second phase goes out to market

The first schools under the long-awaited £2bn second phase of the Priority School Building Programme have gone out to market to contractors.

The programme, which will see 277 schools rebuilt or refurbished, was originally due to run between 2015 and 2021, but was pushed back several times.

However, delivery body the Education Funding Agency (EFA) has now issued an invitation to tender for a batch of schools in the East Midlands, worth around £80m, to the contractors on its framework. Building understands that Wates and Kier are competing for the batch.

In addition, Building can reveal that the EFA has given local authorities and multiple academy trusts the go-ahead to procure more than 70 school projects directly under the programme. This marks a shift away from the model used on the first phase of the programme, which saw the EFA manage all procurement centrally through its contractor frameworks. Mike Green, the EFA’s director of capital, said the move was a “pilot of a local delivery model”.

Green also confirmed that all of the schools in the second phase of the programme would be built using capital funding, rather than PF2. Both types of funding were used in the first phase of the Priority Schools programme.

Green added that the EFA was reviewing its facilities output specification, which sets the standards schools are built to under its programmes.

The specification informed the baseline designs that the EFA produced to demonstrate its approach to school design, which is much more pared back than under the £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme that ran under the last Labour government. However, industry sources do not expect major changes to the design approach.

Green also said that the EFA was starting feasibility studies on schools earlier than it had on previous projects, in order to identify and understand any potential issues before the main construction work begins.