Repair bill for schools in England doubles to over £11bn, survey.

[SydneyRover]

Whoever is correct here it's still a lot of money, whatever happened to a stitch in time?


''A DfE spokesperson said: “Our new 10-year school rebuilding programme, which will transform 500 schools, is under way and will improve the education of tens of thousands of children. We have invested £11.3bn since 2015 in refurbishing school buildings, including £1.8bn in 2021-22 alone.”

But Paul Whiteman of the National Association of Head Teachers said the government’s capital spending on schools had declined by 44% between 2009-10 and 2019-20''

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/may/27/repair-bill-for-schools-in-england-doubles-to-over-11bn-finds-survey

[godlike1]

Most likely to be Paul as it takes anywhere between 1-2 years (sometimes 3) to get a spade in the ground on nearly all of the dfe school programmes. I know because I'm a pm on them.

If they have spent 1.8b it'll be from programmes that were from 4 years ago that have just finished.

You don't pay for the build up front so at most the 4 -5 building programmes being run were generating bills of £250m a year that's still only 1.2b

There's simply not people to manage the overly complex processes the dfe use. I run 6 schemes 2 of which the land has not been bought by the lA yet but they want them open by 2023. Just not possible.

I have 2 college schemes where 2024 is the earliest they will be open.

Most school schemes are now on pieces of land no one wants and other developers would run away from as fast as they could. Not the dfe and so the cost ramps up

[SydneyRover]

That the survey took four years to complete is confounding, there must be a maintenance schedule which gives optimum life balanced with or against the cost of regular maintenance.

They would know how old all assets are c/w when built, when installed, surely it should be along the lines of car servicing.

Added

Thanks GL, I thought that those on the ground would know more but didn't want to jump in.

[godlike1]

Admittedly the srp (school rebuilding programme - or psbp (priority school building programme) does move quicker than the ones I'm involved with there's no way they can spend those sums if money, just not possible.

The cdc data which rates the build quality of the school is comprehensive but mostly already out of date due to how long it took to compile and so its accepted that the schools are in a worse condition than the report says