BSF late and 'up to' £10bn over budget

The Building Schools for the Future target of refurbishing all 3,500 secondary schools by 2020 was dismissed as "fanciful" today by government watchdogs.

A National Audit Office report said the programme is behind schedule and will come in up to £10bn over budget at between £52bn to £55bn.

By last December only 42 of the planned 200 schools had been built. To hit the target of revamping all schools by 2020, 250 schools will need to be rebuilt every year and the number of schools in procurement and construction at any one time will need to double from 2011 onwards.

Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts Edward Leigh said: "The programme has been beset by optimism from the outset. The Department for Children, Schools and Families set unrealistic targets. It underestimated both how long it would take to deliver refurbished or rebuilt schools and how much the programme would cost.

"It should come as no surprise therefore, that the programme is behind schedule and its cost is burgeoning. This has increased to between £52bn and £55bn.

"Four years into the programme, only 42 schools have opened, yet the Department is confidently predicting that it will manage to open 250 schools per year after 2011. Given the rate of progress so far, this seems fanciful.

"DCSF now needs to ensure that it lives up to the tough targets it has set itself."

The report found that 78 per cent of Local Authorities and 86 per cent of companies involved in the BSF programme believe that it is leading to more strategic procurement of school infrastructure than previous school building programmes.

Tim Burr, head of the National Audit Office, said: "Building Schools for the Future is a highly ambitious £55bn programme. Converting that ambition to reality requires robust planning, close cost control and making a success of complex long-term partnerships."

Chief Executive of Partnerships for Schools, Tim Byles said: “The report explicitly recognises that BSF delivers new schools quicker than previous school building programmes and to a higher specification.

“The vast majority of both local authorities and private sector players in the market believe that BSF provides a better way to invest strategically in our schools and there is early evidence that the Local Education Partnership model is leading to further cost and time savings.

“As with a number of other previous reports into BSF, the NAO also points to some of the challenges that BSF faced in the early days of the programme. Although as the report recognises, these have now been addressed, there is no place for complacency in the leadership and management of a programme of this scale and vision. We have been resolute in our commitment to learn lessons from the early days of BSF and will continue to do so to ensure that at every step we are maximising the impact of taxpayers’ money to deliver the new learning environments that every pupil, teacher and community deserves.”