Three firms vie for £120m Pf2 schools

Bam Construction, Morgan Sindall and Laing O’Rourke are to battle it out for a £120m batch of privately-financed schools in Yorkshire, Building can reveal.

The Education Funding Agency confirmed the three firms had been shortlisted for the batch of schools, which is the fourth privately-financed batch to come to market through the Priority Schools Building Programme (PSBP).

Morgan Sindall and Laing O’Rourke have now made it on to three of the four shortlists announced by the EFA for the privately-financed schools batches that have come to market.

The batch comprises seven schools and is worth up to £120m.

The schools in the batch are:

• All Saints Catholic College, Huddersfield
• Belle Vue Boys’ School, Bradford;
• Carlton Bolling College, Bradford
• Harrogate High School, Harrogate
• Oakbank School, Keighley
• Samuel Lister Academy, Bradford
• Whitcliffe Mount Business and Enterprise College, Huddersfield

The winning bidder will design, build, finance and maintain the schools under the government’s new private finance model (Pf2), which will use an organisation to provide debt funding for all of the privately-financed schools batches, rather than each batch having to secure its own funding.

The EFA adopted the aggregator model after it had struggled to raise long-term debt funding for its Pf2 programme.

The news comes as the EFA last week invited contractors to bid for the final batch of Pf2 schools, a £150m group of eight schools in the Midlands.

Last month Building revealed that a partnership between Interserve and investor Kajima had won the first batch of privately-financed schools, a group of seven schools in Hertfordshire, Luton and Reading worth up to £150m.

Morgan Sindall, Laing O’Rourke and Vinci Construction have been shortlisted for the £93m batch of Pf2 schools in the North-west, while Laing O’Rourke, Miller Construction and Sir Robert McAlpine have been shortlisted for the £120m Pf2 batch of schools in the North-east, which was the second batch of private finance schools to come to market through the PSBP.