By David Williams
12th June 2009
A government programme to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school in England has been criticised for falling behind schedule due to poor planning.
The Commons Public Accounts Committee also said it was unclear how Building Schools for the Future would produce educational benefits.
Committee chair Edward Leigh said ‘persistent overoptimism’ in the Department for Children, Schools and Families had led to unrealistic predictions that had not been met, damaging confidence in the scheme.
The £55bn programme’s timescale has already been revised once. Its original completion date was 2015 to 2020, but this was later pushed back to 2023, and only 42 out of the projected 200 schools were finished by the end of 2008.
The PAC did offer some praise for Partnerships for Schools – set up to deliver the programme – for managing the programme centrally and helping local authorities.
Leigh said: ‘The department and Partnerships for Schools must dispel the air of complacency which surrounds them – by indicating in detail how they propose to speed up the pace of delivery.’
‘It’s going to be a tall order,’ he added, pointing out that the number of schools being constructed must now double if the BSF is to meet its schedule.
But a DCSF spokesman accused critics of ‘living in the past’, claiming rapid progress was now being made.
He said that 200 BSF schools would be opening per year by 2011. ‘The BSF is a completely unprecedented project – it’s not a race to spend money,’ he said.
